moralizing
I Was Knocking On Your Ear’s Door But You Were Always Out
Recently I had a three-hour conversation with a woman on a plane who was struggling with a family issue, and we actually got somewhere. She thanked me for the time, confessing she had almost gone to AI the night before. I was so glad to have taken the place of the machine, even though it cost me some alone time. Now that I know AI’s counselling allure experientially, I aim to resist it all the more. It is an act of human defiance to be there for each other anyway, to continue to fill the spaces the machines would all too willingly fill in our absence.
That’s great. I mean it sincerely. Yet it must be said: his example is a lottery win. It depends on a three-hour flight, the right seatmate, the right mood, the right person willing and able to talk, and a man who has the temperament and perspective to play volunteer counselor on command. Many people don’t get that lucky. They’re not sitting next to Professor Pastoral on a plane. They’re sitting alone in an apartment after a shift at a dead-end job, with a phone, a headache, and nobody who wants to deal with “thinky stuff.” “Be there for each other anyway” is beautiful as an aspiration, but as a prescription it assumes a social world that lots of people do not inhabit.
I’m reminded of the parable of the drowning man: The flood rises. A man refuses a rescue boat — “God will provide” — refuses a second boat — “God will provide” — refuses the helicopter — “God will provide” — and then drowns. In heaven he complains, and God says, I sent you two boats and a helicopter. Milliner admits that he tried to “pray that prayer” of thanks to God for sending such a helpful tool to him, but somehow couldn’t do it. The lofty advice here is: refuse the imperfect help and wait for the ideal help. Don’t use the chatbot; go find real community; do it the “right” way. Okay. When your actual life contains no such community, or contains it only in meager doses, what then? Intellectuals, whether right or left, religious or secular, all tend to gravitate toward the neat, tidy, elegant theory of life. As a miso-intellectual, I’m more interested in the real-world casualties that get left out, the savaged body parts littering the floor around the bed of Procrustes.
This is just a problem of scarcity. Attention is scarce. Thoughtful feedback is scarce. Adult life is triage. If you have the option of real human counsel, by all means, take it. If you don’t, and the choices are to grind alone inside your skull, pester busy people who won’t respond, or use a limited tool that is available and “good enough,” then yes, many people are going to take the boat that actually shows up.
When the Punishment Begins
By the time the church bell quits tolling, they’re already gathering at the gaol. The rumor has traveled faster than any rider: dark doings among the scribes. Something unclean has happened in the scriptorium. A man of the guild! one of them, trained in the sacred arts of ink and ledger! — has been seen consorting with the enemy. The crowd presses closer, anxious and thrilled, crossing themselves as if the very idea might infect the air. They mutter about corrupted ink and devilish machines. And there! Pangram, Botfinder General, straight-backed, solemn, with his shiny new device that turns speculation into a number. He announces his judgment: under interrogation, the scribe’s work has been shown to bear the Devil’s watermark. That’s all they require. Relief loosens their faces. Now they can go home feeling righteous, already anticipating tomorrow’s sport: the culprit in the pillory, the mob’s clean-conscience holiday, rotten vegetables thrown in the name of virtue.
This is what it looks like in a despoiled information ecosystem when people start hunting for scapegoats. Social media already fractured the old reality-brokering order; now AI arrives and further upsets the balance of power. Video can be faked, audio can be faked, and worst of all for the scribes, text can now be convincingly mimicked too. Nobody trusts anything or anyone. It’s a Lord of the Flies media environment, and everyone’s ready to kill over who gets to wield the conch of authoritative speech. The old agenda-setters feel their entire way of life slipping away, and set about like modern Luddites in a futile effort to smash the new narrative-weaving machines. In that atmosphere, even reasonable people start craving a single line between real and artificial, human and machine.
I’m only superficially familiar with René Girard, but I couldn’t help thinking of him here. Fear wants an object. Anxiety wants a face. Suspicion wants judgment and a sentence. One one level, this episode is about the particulars of journalistic ethics. On a deeper level, this is about the anxieties many people feel as their place in the world feels threatened. We’re anxious over what it even means to be human in such a cyborg world, especially when technology can convincingly mimic even the most quintessential human activities, like art and craft. Ironically, we outsource our uncertain judgment to…more machine analysis, more software. Pangram, and other similar bot informers, will serve as the authority demarcating the real from the artificial. Most people won’t know how Pangram works, or how reliably it works, if at all, but it doesn’t matter. We just need to believe it does what we need it to, and then we feel relief. The world makes sense again, and now we can focus on punishing the scapegoats: the species-traitors who collaborated.
Immoral Voltron
In “Mechanical Man,” Lou Barlow sang, “When I said I understood, I only knew where to stand.” He seemed to anticipate the conformist idiocy of online discourse. Not “what is this thing?” but “what vibe is this thing?” Tocqueville noted this two hundred years ago: when you remove custom and aristocracy as sources of authority, people don’t start thinking independently; they just start nervously measuring themselves against their peers. We’ve stopped forming views and started presenting ourselves in stances. Understanding the object is old-fashioned. The point is to locate it on the moral map as fast as possible, because the map is the social world and nobody wants to be caught in the wrong zip code.
Once the sorting happens, the story writes itself. A complex technology becomes a one-stop portal for every available sin: data centers in poor areas, poisoned water, higher utility bills, racism, “classicism,” fascism, the death of art, and the reduction of your mind to sludge. It’s the inverse of Berlin’s monism: not “all goods must fit together in a harmonious whole,” but “all evils must fit together in a malevolent whole.” Snap on racism. Snap on classism. Snap on pollution. Snap on fascism. Congratulations; you’ve formed IMMORAL VOLTRON. Now you don’t have to argue about particulars; you just point at the monster and scream.
The trick, of course, is that these mad-libs incantations don’t enlighten; they discipline. Once AI is declared contaminated, any hesitation becomes complicity. To question one link in the chain is to “reveal yourself” as the kind of person who would defend the whole chain. Berlin’s emphasis on pluralism, tragic conflict, and incommensurable goods dies here, because pluralism requires the adult ability to say: some harms are real, some benefits are real, and people can disagree on how to balance them without being cast as villains. But stance culture can’t afford that. It needs a single verdict, a single villain, a single shaming label. Tradeoffs are messy; exorcisms are tidy.
Relligiosi
Relligiosi
That’s what I call those who take it upon themselves to convince others and make them similar to themselves, make them think in the same way.
I abhor this kind of mental usurping, the great task of political parties and confessions.
What matters for you, doesn’t matter for me. Because it matters for you, it doesn’t matter for me.
To understand oneself, it’s essential (in my eyes) to think differently.— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1
Via Paul Kingsnorth. And what does this pledge entail, you may ask?
Do you support the campaign? Go rape yourself, that’s my response. Even answering that question concedes too much to the commissar asking it. It’s none of your goddamned business how I feel about AI use. I don’t owe you a pledge, a badge, a logo in my sidebar, or an affidavit about my writing process. If I read something and it feels synthetic, I’m free to close the tab and avoid that writer in the future. That’s how grown-ups handle taste, without forming a militia and a blacklist.
What I can’t stand, as always, is the missionary spirit animating this entire self-appointed class of jumped-up hall monitors: the righteous salesmanship, the demand for public alignment, the insinuation that silence is complicity. This “download a free logo and join us” routine is a ritual with no barrier to entry for people who like the feeling of conscience without the burden of thought. Once the ritual exists, the next stage is guaranteed: bot-sniffing as sport, comment-section inquisitions, and purity audits, as though the only point of reading is to detect the Devil’s watermark.
This is the online HOA, or the Concerned Citizens Council, coming to the door with clipboards and smiles, asking you to sign. And underneath the smile is the implied threat: Do you want us to make it known that you refused? Because that’s how these things work. There is no neutral ground in a holy war. The whole point of the ritual is to sort the righteous from the wicked, and to make “I decline” sound like a confession. Even if you happen to agree with this particular campaign, the same petty functionaries will be back knocking on your door next week, with clipboards and smiles, expecting your participation in the next loyalty test. Whenever you finally decline, the smiles will vanish, and you’ll see them for what they really are.
The most a campaign like this can do is create another platform for virtue-signaling (as if we needed more) and another excuse for resentful mediocrities to claw at higher-status targets under a banner of public morality. Watch how quickly “protecting the craft” turns into guilty-until-proven-innocent accusations. It invites the exact type Valéry despised: the mental usurper, the person who can’t just choose their own life, but must conscript yours into their crusade. No thanks. Read what you want. Write what you want, how you want. And leave me out of your religion.
Your Own Personal Jesus
Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.
The Gospels do not present a soft, therapeutic Jesus whose entire public mission is to validate the politics of educated suburban moms. You can assemble a “nice Jesus” out of carefully chosen lines — feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, forgive seventy times seven — just as you can assemble a “hard Jesus” out of other lines: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and the blunt demand that allegiance to him outrank even family and life itself. The text is not a simple moral pamphlet. If you want to recruit it as a partisan cudgel, you can.
And if you step outside the sermon and into history, the problem gets worse. A great deal of serious scholarship situates Jesus in the world of Jewish apocalyptic expectation: the sense that the end is near, judgment is coming, and everything is about to be overturned. In that context, the radical ethic is spoken from a very different time-horizon. The ethics of someone who thinks the apocalypse is nigh are not the ethics of someone trying to raise a family, pay a mortgage, keep a business afloat, care for aging parents, and make decisions under imperfect information for the next forty years.
Too much modern moralizing is childish. Most of our ethical disagreements aren’t because one side loves cruelty and the other side loves compassion. They’re because life forces us to juggle duties: generosity versus solvency, mercy versus safety, forgiveness versus deterrence, ideals versus consequences, the immediate relief of suffering versus the slow work of building institutions that don’t collapse under the weight of good intentions. Some stances are easier when you think tomorrow won’t come. Some forms of purity are only available to people who won’t have to live with the bill.
So no, there is no pure Christianity floating above politics, untouched by human desire. There never was. There is only the hard work we can’t escape: interpreting unclear information, weighing competing goods, choosing under uncertainty, revising in light of consequences, and doing it again next week. If you’re looking for a Jesus who saves you from judgment, who issues you a laminated, unambiguous policy sheet, you’re asking for the one thing the human condition doesn’t offer. No easy answers are coming to save us. The work is the point.
The Fly On the Coach Wheel
Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
On a brief-lived, long-defunct website called The Philosopher’s Mail, Alain de Botton once wrote, regarding our strange habit of news consumption:
For most of history, it was extremely difficult to come by information about what was happening anywhere else. And you probably didn’t mind. What difference would it make, if you were a crofter in the Hebrides, to learn that a power struggle was brewing in the Ottoman Empire?
Much of what we now take for granted as news has its origins in the information needed by people taking major decisions or at the centre of national affairs. We still hear the echoes in the way news is reported; timing is assumed to be critical, as it really would be if we were active agents. If you don’t have the latest update you might make a terrible blunder or miss a wonderful opportunity.
Ease of communication and a generous democratic impulse mean that information originally designed for decision makers, now gets routinely sent via the media to very large numbers of people. It is as if a dossier, with the latest news from Kiev, which might properly arrive on the desk of a minister has accidentally been delivered to the wrong address and ends up on the breakfast table of a librarian in Colchester or an electrician in Pitlochry. But the librarian or electrician might quite reasonably turn round and politely point out that they can’t do anything with this knowledge and that, surely, the files have come to them by mistake. They don’t, but only because habit has closed our eyes to the underlying strangeness of the phenomenon.
A lot of the loudest “global concern” is just misdirected energy: aspirational middling busybodies auditioning for moral significance because ordinary competence feels too small, too boring, too exposing. It’s easier to have a take on Venezuela than to be patient with your spouse; easier to denounce villains abroad than to stop being a minor villain at home; easier to refresh the outrage feed than to fix what’s right in front of you. We laugh at the absurd status and fashion competitions of centuries past, like coiffures de style pouf or crinolines. We haven’t yet learned to laugh at today’s equally frivolous, po-faced equivalents.
I’m not interested in what’s going on in Venezuela, any more than I was interested in what’s going on in Gaza, or Ukraine, or whatever came before on the revolving carousel of shiny objects for people too full of their own self-importance to get lost in a good novel. I don’t say that in an assertive way, as if to put my own egoistic stance forward in competition with the rest. I say it as a rebuke to the civic superstition that we’re obliged to register our solemn opinions for the greater good. I say it because the fact of my interest, or the lack thereof, is utterly irrelevant to any real-world consequences. Not just my interest — yours, too, and every other idiot’s. Online, we’re expected to cast moral votes all day long, as if the right opinion, stated on schedule, were a lever connected to the world. It’s not. Most of this is status competition disguised as conscience. I’d prefer it if people went back to weaving birdcages and model ships into their three-foot-high wigs for attention instead.
Too many people seem to believe in some primitive notion of sympathetic magic, as if emoting toward an issue or event affects it. It does not. Most of us, you and me included, are insignificant and ineffectual nobodies. At best, we could be useful friends, devoted spouses, diligent workers, or involved community members. We might even develop some kind of rich inner life that precludes empty gestures aimed to win the approval of distant strangers. None of us are worth a sputtering wet shit as pundits, prophets, or amateur Secretaries of State, and I refuse to dignify this ridiculous ritual with my respectful attention.
The Long, Foul Rant That Is Our Moment In History
My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 or 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.
— Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
The internet didn’t invent deception, of course, but it did make mediation the default condition of social life. Most of us have probably heard the old joke from the New Yorker: on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Once you live through screens, you’re always inferring a reality you cannot directly inspect. Even when nobody is lying, the medium itself encourages curation, performance, selective lighting, selective framing. A fragile trust is inherent from the start.
Social media monetized that uncertainty. It turned identity into a product and status into a scoreboard. It incentivized us to treat the self as a brand and attention as a currency — quantified, gamable, and therefore permanently vulnerable to counterfeiting. Filters, lighting, editing, branding, metrics; none of it is “fake” in the simple sense. It’s real, but optimized. And optimization is the prelude to suspicion, because it blurs the line between honest self-presentation and calculated manipulation.
As Gurri explains in his excellent book, the basic claim that institutions can certify reality — this is true; this is false; these are the rules; this is what happened — has been weakened. That doesn’t mean institutions are always wrong, or that the public is always right. It means the power to end arguments by proclamation has decayed. The public can keep disputes permanently open. Competing narratives can be built cheaply, distributed instantly, and defended by swarms of “people from nowhere.” Arguments metastasize, every claim begins to feel like propaganda, every correction begins to feel like power protecting itself, every disagreement starts to carry the tone of betrayal. You don’t merely think I’m mistaken; you think I’m captured, paid, brainwashed, malignant, or stupid. And once that adversarial posture becomes political weather, it spreads. “Chaos rampant, an age of distrust. Confrontation, impulsive habitat,” the metal band Slayer sang, describing hell, social media, or both.
For a while, we still had reliable tells. Spam looked like spam. Machine writing sounded like a machine. Bad Photoshop had a visible sheen. The reassuring thing about fakery was that it was legible.
Generative AI is an accelerant because it collapses the tells. It produces competent imitation at scale — text, images, voices, short videos — often good enough to pass the first glance, sometimes good enough to pass the second. So the aesthetic question (“is it good?”) gets replaced by a forensic question: “Who made this, how, and do they deserve credit?” When outputs get cheap, the status war moves to authorship and provenance. Everyone becomes a customs officer stamping passports of authenticity.
It’s common to say “online isn’t real life,” and for a long time that was comforting because in-person reality could still function as the ultimate lie detector. Filters might beautify a photo, but presence would reassert itself up close. You can curate your profile, but you can’t curate your face at close range under ordinary lighting on an ordinary day. Digital editing can’t firm up a weak handshake.
Except now the body itself is becoming a kind of interface, not so much because bodies are “fake” than because the meaning of a body is less legible. PEDs and GLP-1s create an actual result, not a mere illusion. The suspicious question isn’t “is that physique real?” It’s: “What does it signify?”
For decades, we treated physical transformations — lean bodies, muscular bodies, big lifts, dramatic before-and-after stories — as costly credentials. We read them as moral evidence: discipline, self-control, sacrifice, will. You could argue about how fair that moral reading was, but it was socially legible. It made sorting easy. Now, a person can be leaner because appetite has been pharmacologically altered. A person can be bigger and stronger because recovery and hypertrophy are pharmacologically assisted. Now the old inference (“therefore virtue”) is unreliable because the method is opaque. And humans hate unreliable inference. We hate it the way we hate a loaded die: not only because it might be unfair, but because it makes the game hard to interpret.
Then comes the new complication: AI doesn’t arrive as just another tool, like a better wrench. People talk to it. It answers. It imitates personality. It can console, flatter, argue, roleplay. So even if it has no intentions in the strict sense, it reliably triggers the human perception of agency. A new force enters the already-chaotic field — something that can amplify messages, imitate people, generate culture, automate persuasion — and the public can’t agree what kind of thing it is. Friend, enemy, mercenary, or merely a new industrial capability. The disagreement itself becomes part of the atmosphere. Europe got a “German Question” in 1871. We’re getting an “AI Question” now.
Our atmosphere of suspicion is less paranoia than a rational adaptation to broken shortcuts. When cheap trust signals stop working, people do what they always do: they demand receipts (“prove it,” “disclose it,” “show your drafts,” “are you natural?”), they invent new tells (“AI slop,” “natty or not,” “Ozempic face”), and they fight to rewrite the moral code. It encourages moral entrepreneurship. Not everyone is seeking truth; everyone is seeking advantage. Authenticity becomes a weapon because authenticity is a status currency in a world where the old currency is being inflated.
It’s sort of like musical chairs. Technological change, as it often does, has set the music playing again, and people are circling around warily, hoping to be well-positioned in the scrum for a high-status seat once it stops. Eventually some settlement will arrive. Possibly, as Gurri says, one that defies the terms of the struggle. But for now, the defining feeling is that the old shortcuts for telling what’s real are failing, and we haven’t yet agreed on new ones.
The Descent of Manners
To point out the obvious, the bystander isn’t witnessing a moral collapse; he’s noticing a new rule of attention: access is negotiated. People reading a book or a phone aren’t necessarily refusing to engage; they’re engaged already. What he wants is ambient availability — others to idle in neutral until he arrives, ready to drop everything and pay attention to him. If he truly values conversation, there’s a grown-up remedy that predates smartphones: be forthright and tell people that you want to set aside time for each other’s undivided attention. If you want to be unkind, you could say that his attitude is just narcissism dressed up as social critique.
There’s also a rhetorical sleight-of-hand here. Wanye’s framing invites us to see an inevitable connection in the evolution of private time from one stage to the next. What it ignores is is that each stage of the progression also brought new ways of interacting, not simply an inexorable decline from sociable creatures reciting family lore around the hearth to mute recluses grunting while pawing at their glowing screens.
Let’s start at the supposed root of decline: books. Far from turning readers into hermits, print built rooms — literal ones. Carnegie libraries put free civic space on Main Street where strangers mixed and clubs met; lyceum halls and Chautauqua tents turned reading into lectures, debates, and summer festivals; serialization synchronized strangers around the next chapter; and literary societies — from Baker Street Irregulars onward — gave readers rituals, calendars, and friends. Even the frequent claims about fiction sharpening our perspective-taking, while weak in reality, point the same way: text can widen the circle we can imagine. Even the first rung in Wanye’s ladder to the abyss doesn’t subtract sociability; it manufactures it. The same holds for the other stages. The penny press turned news into a shared daily event; general-interest magazines shaped national debates and helped create the middlebrow intellectual milieu; television and film created shared events and stories that “everyone” saw and talked about; and even the Pandora’s jar we call the Internet has facilitated real connections underneath all the superficial versions. Not every stage is a perfect balance of pluses and minuses — personally, I think that “news as a shared daily event” has been a disaster. But the point is, all of these developments bring us together in new ways even as they force us apart in others.
The eulogies for village hearth talk forget the cost of living in the village. Not everyone belonged. Many people had to flee to become themselves. Meanwhile, modernity invented new communal rituals that critics pretend don’t count. Sports fandom, for example, is a standing, rule-bound festival: seasons, epics, numerical folklore, a calendar of shared rites. Is it less “real” community than the harvest dance because jerseys come from a corporate pro shop? Tell that to the thousands who gather again when a certain game comes on, or the strangers who become friends by arguing about the same running back for ten years.
Likewise, the ability to make friends by interest rather than proximity is not a trivial gain. It redeemed entire lives. The bright kid alone in a small town could find a teacher, a collaborator, a bandmate, a spouse. The awkward adult could keep a craft alive by joining ten others on the Internet keeping it alive. How many people today would be merely tolerated eccentrics without the option of being fully themselves inside a niche? The map got bigger; the village got weirder; a lot of us survived because of it.
And yes, we lost things. We lost the steady rehearsal of family lore. We lost some of the built-in rhythm; we have to invent it now. We lost shared silence — being together without performance. We outsourced more of our attention to machines that will gladly sell it back to us at markup. But calling these changes a moral degradation is like scolding birds for not being tyrannosaurs. History isn’t a fall from grace; it’s a series of habitat changes. The climate shifted; small bodies with feathers were a better bet. Evolution, if not natural selection, applies to human societies as well. Human sociability isn’t decaying or perfecting; it’s adapting — new habitats select for different mixes of depth, reach, rhythm, and cost, producing trade-offs rather than moral victories or defeats. The only thing that remains constant is our conviction that we live in a fallen age.
One Side of a Personality
Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism.
— George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character. As Ye once riffed (prophetically) during a live performance, “I get my quotes from movies because I don’t read, or from, like, go figure, real life or something. Like, live real life; talk to real people; get information; ask people questions; and it was something about, ‘You either die a superhero or you live to become the villain.’” As clever as that sounds, receiving all of your information from the SBF ideal of six-paragraph blog posts, or from the movies and random conversations that Ye prefers, is as foolish as identifying as someone who chooses to eat only fast food.
Many books should not have been published, and writing one is an excruciating process full of failure. But when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue.
I would defend the practice of reading simply because it is, so to speak, my home. As Michael Oakeshott put it, “What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity.” I have always been a reader and always will be, and as such, the aggressively illiterate types that Williams talks about are beneath my contempt — although, I would add, I didn’t need to know that Kanye West, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Sean McElwee hated books to gauge their lack of character; that should have been obvious to anyone beforehand. All that said, though, I have no desire to proselytize on behalf of the “virtue” of concentration and refinement, let alone witness to the heathens. I know many people who will cheerfully inform you that they haven’t read a book since high school, and yet they are still good people in all the ways that matter. Conversely, I would just point to any number of authors and academics as proof that a lifetime’s immersion in literature doesn’t necessarily do anything to develop character or general intelligence. By all means, spend your time reading. Just don’t fall prey to the conceit (that particularly seems to afflict writers for the Atlantic) that you’re “progressing” in any way by doing it.
Let Us Not Become Darker Ourselves On Their Account
It’s true that the Overton window among Western elites is contracting like the trash compactor in the Death Star not only upon morally acceptable positions, but also on morally edifying ones. But the response of conservatives cannot be to lament the existence of this cultural regulation, or to pretend that there was a time when it didn’t exist. Instead, they have to defend the moral merits of their positions and argue that others (like the reverse-racism of intersectional politics and the mutilation of children by transgender activists) should be cancelled with unapologetic fervor. Our civilization cannot hide behind procedural liberalism when it comes to first principles, and it’s folly to pretend we can. Genuinely moral and political conflicts are, in some cases, unavoidable. Cancellation is the price we pay for civilization.
Hilditch’s point is one I worried about years ago — social norms have never resulted from opposing sides engaging in rational debate until consensus was achieved. At some point, the losing side surrenders or is beaten into sullen submission. The majority of people who don’t much care either way will go along with the new regime. Procedural liberalism, as wonderful as it is, is an anomaly. Tribal warfare is the norm. Without mutual trust and respect for the institutions in which proceduralism is embedded, tribalism will always take over. The fact that people on the left are so dismissive of concerns over cancel culture, if not positively supportive of it, is one of those revealed preferences indicating that they feel confident of controlling and directing it, not suffering from it. Most people are fine with tyrannical power as long as it’s assumed that they and their tribe will always be the ones wielding it.
Anyway, it’s true but trite that civilization has always depended on social sanctions as much as the rule of law. Cancel culture per se is a phenomenon of the late twenty-teens and early twenty-twenties, in which progressives harness the power of social media to punish and ostracize both enemies and erstwhile comrades for offenses both real and hallucinatory; petty vindictiveness in general has been around forever. Perhaps we can at least be thankful, as we watch the progressive ouroboros predictably continue to devour its tail in pursuit of perfect virtue, that we’re using tweets instead of guillotines this time around. Still, it saddens me to think that a charitable spirit of free speech, fair play and tolerance is one more thing we’ll have to pack up and take with us to the monastery, along with our books.
A Persecuting Religion
Whatever we may think of the relative claims of the two religions, one fact is now logically self-evident: that the new religion, every bit as much as the old religion, will be a persecuting religion. It will be, by its very nature, a thing fighting for its life against the normal forces of human nature; every bit as much as has been alleged of any system of asceticism or self-denial in the past. It is indeed a case in which extremes meet; though, in truth, extremes often meet because they are much less extreme than people suppose. The modern Pacifist is really very like the ancient Puritan; the man who now has a horror of all theology is very like the man who then had a horror of all things except theology. And the proof is in this practical case. The old Calvinist, like the new Communist, really did forbid children to read stories about fairies. The old Puritan, like the new peace-man, really would forbid boys to read a penny dreadful about pirates. This new idealist is not even new, in the manner of the babe unborn. He is our own Puritan great-grandfather dreadfully risen from the dead.
— G. K. Chesterton, “On the New Prudery”
****
All of that nags like an eyelash caught behind your contact lens, and it’s because you are watching a religion being born. That its adherents don’t realize they are under the influence of a religion is precisely evidence that this is what it is. No, that is not recapitulating The Elect’s circularity thing, that if you say you aren’t a racist then you are. When you say you aren’t a racist, you give reasons why – your commitments, your views, your history, these days often your dating history or even your spouse. This should qualify as coherent defense and it does. But with The Elect, if we tell them they are religious, they cannot defend themselves with even a stab at logic.
They insist that self-mortification is political activism – fail. They insist that being black is ever and only oppression from the white man – fail. That black people labor under threat of the return of disfranchisement as a people because Republicans try to depress black turnout to lower Democrat tallies, even though black women were central in determining the election of Joe Biden as President along with a black American Vice-President? Fail.
Only religion can explain why anyone would think that all of this doubletalk is sense. You, black or not, are not crazy to get that this stuff doesn’t wash. And your job is to learn to cover your ears against what feels like verbal jiu-jitsu from those whose sense of significance is founded in denying reason and teaching people who have already been through enough to build their identities around a studied sense of victimhood.
Of course, they call themselves pursuing “social justice,” thus telling the rest of us that we are resisting “social justice.” Some of them will claim that the thesis of this book is that “seeking social justice is just a religion.” Don’t get tripped up. They are using the term to refer to their very specific and questionable sense of what social justice is, and as such, to ask us whether we are “against social justice” qualifies as a dirty trick along the lines of being asked if you still beat your spouse. Or not – but only because they are arguing from religion, and for that reason truly do not imagine that their version of social justice is something other than scripture.
Do you see? I hope I am getting you to follow me, and I hope you will stay with me for the next chapter where I will outline the point more closely. That may sound dull, but I don’t think it will be – we just need to look at matters a little more closely to truly get what we are up against among people who seem so normal. We are genuinely in Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory. They will insist that they are not religious, but impotently so, before the simple propositions of this chapter. Adoring their kids, poaching their salmon, strumming their ukuleles barefooted, savoring their Stones and Coldplay and Adele, they may seem unlike what we think of as “religious.”
Don’t be fooled. Religion knows no culture. Nor do all religions entail the worship of a God (The Elect lacks one), or even forgiveness (which The Elect do not seem to have exactly caught up with just yet). As Eric Hoffer put it, religions don’t need a God but they need a devil, and The Elect have that down quite comfortably. Superstition, clergy, sinfulness, a proselytizing impulse, a revulsion against the impure – it’s all there. They think of it all as logic incarnate.
But so did Martin Luther.
Some Causes Are More Equal Than Others
Broken record here:
Our information ecosystem is REALLY messed up right now. When sharp, reasonable, even-handed people are unable to figure out what’s true because of a justified suspicion of *all* outlets, the result will be collective epistemic collapse.
“I trust nothing”
— Alan Levinovitz (@AlanLevinovitz) June 11, 2020
“Public-Health Experts Are Not Hypocrites“:
At its core, the argument being leveled against public-health experts is that the reason for the protests shouldn’t matter. The coronavirus doesn’t care whether it’s attending an anti-lockdown protest or an anti-racism one. But these two kinds of protests are not equivalent from a public-health perspective. Some critics might argue that the anti-lockdown protests promoted economic activity, which can help stave off the health implications of poverty. (On this count, public-health experts were ahead of the curve: Many—including one of us—were advocating for a massive infusion of assistance to individual Americans as early as March.) But these protests were organized by pro-gun groups that believe the National Rifle Association is too compromising on gun safety. Egged on by the president to “save your great 2nd Amendment,” anti-lockdown protesters stormed government buildings with assault rifles and signs reading covid-19 is a lie. The anti-lockdown demonstrations were explicitly at odds with public health, and experts had a duty to oppose them. The current protests, in contrast, are a grassroots uprising against systemic racism, a pervasive and long-standing public-health crisis that leads to more than 80,000 excess deaths among black Americans every year.
One epidemiologist from Harvard, and one from Yale. Again, I stress, these are not “anti-science” fundamentalists telling us we can pray the virus away; it’s doctrinaire progressives indulging in sheer sophistry for the sake of political tribalism. “It’s okay when we do it, because our cause is righteous.”
Even if, just for the sake of argument, we grant the dubious assertion that “systemic racism” is a “public-health crisis” responsible for 80,000 deaths a year, it would still be ridiculous to compare a chronic crisis to an acute one, which is what the pandemic is. If I slice open my femoral artery with a saw, the chronic arthritic pain in my lower back becomes a lesser problem for the time being. Granted, I’m not trained in the new math of progressivism, but it appears inarguable that if one health crisis causes over 100,000 deaths in three months, and another supposedly causes 80,000 deaths per year, the former crisis is still more dangerous and a greater priority, however passionate you are about the latter. No matter how creative you get in playing with words and numbers to define “systemic racism,” I don’t think even these propagandist hacks are going to claim that “systemic racism” is in danger of deluging emergency rooms and intensive care units, which is the entire reason we were told that our individual assessment of risk was immaterial. You may be willing to risk your own life, but you will almost surely spread the virus to other, more vulnerable people who did not choose to take that risk, and furthermore, in doing so, you will contribute to overloading the limited resources of the hospitals. These dangers are unique to the acute crisis. Or so we were told until it became politically convenient to ignore it.
In truth, it’s probably the case that people were simply sick of being cooped up and would have seized on any pretext to leave their houses and assemble together again. Everyone loves to have a good excuse to do things they know they’re not supposed to do. If millions of people decide to engage in mass civil disobedience, there’s little any government can do to stop them. But telling the truth is always an option, and too many public health experts have chosen to be cowards and engage in flimsy rationalizations instead.
“Even so, people must remain open to the possibility that if a second wave of infections occurs, public-health officials may need to suggest stricter lockdown measures once again.” Yeah, good luck with that. And good luck with expecting anyone to listen to what “the science says” on vaccines and climate change ever again, now that you’ve openly sacrificed your professional integrity to political correctness. I swear, these idiots are too stupid to even realize what long-term damage they’ve done.
He Rapes, But He Saves, And He Saves More Than He Rapes
So what is the greatest good or the greatest harm? Mr. Biden, and the Democrats he may carry with him into government, are likely to do more good for women and the nation than his competition, the worst president in the history of the Republic. Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do, the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it. And don’t call me an amoral realist. Utilitarianism is not a moral abdication; it is a moral stance.
— Linda Hirshman, “I Believe Tara Reade. I’m Voting for Joe Biden Anyway.”
****
I’ve never met Bill Cosby, so I’m not defending him. Let’s just remember that he has a valuable legacy that I can’t just throw away. I remember that he’s the first black man to ever win an Emmy in television. I also remember that he’s the first guy to make a cartoon with black characters where their lips and noses were drawn proportionately. I remember that he had a television show that got numbers equivalent to the Super Bowl every Thursday night. And I remember that he partnered up with a clinical psychologist to make sure that there was not one negative image of African-Americans on his show. I’m telling you, that’s no small thing. I’ve had a television show. I wouldn’t have done that shit. He gave tens of millions of dollars to African-American institutions of higher learning, and is directly responsible for thousands of black kids going to college. Not just the ones he raped. Here comes the kicker. You ready? Here’s the fact that I heard, but haven’t confirmed. I heard that when Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said he had a dream, he was speaking into a PA system that Bill Cosby paid for. So, you understand what I’m saying? The point is this: He rapes, but he saves. And he saves more than he rapes. But he probably does rape.
— Dave Chappelle, The Age of Spin
****
“Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.
— Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I Was Blind But Now All the Pain I See
I think of this as the second part of the mystery around New Atheism’s decline: why did a successful social movement so quietly and complacently agree to turn into a totally different social movement?
As always, it’s hard to briefly summarize one of Alexander’s posts, but: he’s wondering why New Atheism went out of fashion, and concludes that it mostly morphed into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Social Justice, Inc. I’d agree with that. The roadies of online atheism, like PZ Myers, looking for a way to differentiate themselves from the rock stars like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, hit upon the idea of infusing New Atheism with New Left identity politics, and with identity politics being the cancer it is, it quickly metastasized and devoured its host. Alexander thinks this change was because New Atheism was a failed hamartiology, “a subfield of theology dealing with the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe.” New Atheism blamed social ills on the irrationality of religious beliefs. Social justice blamed social ills on racism/sexism/etc. For whatever reason, whether it was due to deep convictions or the ephemerality of intellectual fashions, more people eventually found the social justice brand more convincing.
He only mentions Internet culture in passing, noting the differences between the before/after social media eras:
At some point, in a way unrelated to the fall of New Atheism, the Internet stopped being like this. The topics that interest people today don’t get debated in the same way. People dunk on each other on Twitter, occasionally even have back-and-forth exchanges, but the average person doesn’t post long screeds and get equally long responses fisking each of their points. There’s less need for giant databases containing every fact you might need to win a particular argument, organized Dewey-Decimal-style by which argument you are trying to win. People just stopped caring.
He doesn’t follow this line of thought much further, which seems to me a shame. Yes, the style of online argument changed — because instead of a limited number of people using blogs and message boards, a huge number of people started using Facebook and Twitter. The conversational center of gravity shifted; or, if you prefer, online conversation finally found its way down to sea level. Noise drowned out signal. Intricate, tedious debates about theology and morality, of interest only to a select minority of intellectuals, couldn’t compete with the deafening roar of vox populi. The law of noospheric entropy states that ideas and concepts are forever decaying into clichés, slogans and buzzwords. This is all the more relevant when people, who are naturally lazy to begin with, are handed tools like social media which make communication as quick and thoughtless as possible.
But even if technology explains why discourse became dumber over the last fifteen years, what does that have to do with the shift in focus? Why did we start arguing more loudly and stupidly about social justice than about religion? My suggestion, as always, is to credit demographics. The mini-baby boom of the millennial generation produced a surge of overeducated, underemployed twenty-somethings which just happened to coincide with the shift to smartphones and social media. Suddenly, the collective voice of those who had accrued far too much debt in pursuit of a worthless degree was amplified and broadcast like never before. They didn’t have careers yet and weren’t optimistic about getting any, and they hadn’t settled down with families yet, so they had a lot of free time to post and tweet reflexive reactions to the news, informed by whatever they learned in their grievance-studies courses. Will they age out of it? Will social justice lunacy and trans trendiness be the twenty-teens version of mullets and parachute pants from the ’80s? Or will social media preserve all the same norms for successive generations? I suppose only time will tell.
I do agree that ours is a sin-haunted culture, however post-religious we think we are. We’re just as obsessed with avoiding the Devil’s omnipresent snares as any Puritan ever was. We don’t accuse women of dancing with Old Nick during blasphemous rites in a churchyard under a full moon anymore; we accuse young men of consorting with misogynists, racists and duplicitous Russians under cover of the dark web. That’s why I keep reiterating that the social-justice atheists should just go ahead and rebrand themselves as the newest phase of the Protestant Reformation, redefining sin and righteousness for a postmodern age.
I Love Life’s Surprises So Much, I Don’t Want to Know What’s Ahead
The “x might plausibly encourage y” argument against free speech has been with us for a very long time. It was the basis for the persecution of heretics in the Christian world, the censorship that John Milton criticized in the 17th century, the suppression of war protesters in the United States (the legal justification of which is the origin of the ubiquitous “fire in a crowded theater” trope), and the effort to censor and marginalize rap music in the 1980s, a project that brought to public prominence a woman called Tipper Gore, at the time Mrs. Al. Mrs. Gore’s name became, for a generation, the national shorthand for prudish blue-rinsed tight-assery allied to scheming political opportunism. She was a figure of fun, loathed by all right-thinking people. But Tipper Gore–ism, like the poor, syphilis, and usury, we shall always have with us.
One of the genuine pleasures of middle-age is seeing stupid intellectual trends come around again. I mean that sincerely. I’m not one of those who wear a veneer of hard-bitten cynicism to cover a core of progressive idealism. I’m not crying inside as I watch former defenders of free speech turn into moralistic censors. I’m honestly chuckling at the absurdity of this cultural game of musical chairs. When I was an adolescent, it was Christian conservatives (and opportunistic liberals like the Gores) who wanted to bowdlerize popular culture and stop the lovable kids in Footloose from dancing at their prom. Now it’s po-faced progressives who find everything fun to be “problematic” and life-threatening. No one is immune to this conceit, and no one is “progressing” toward anything. Human souls may not reincarnate, but ideas and impulses surely do. Leaves will bud, flourish, blaze and fall; notions formerly dismissed as passé will be refurbished and reintroduced. It’s simultaneously amusing and reassuring to understand that there’s nothing to do but enjoy the spectacle in all its ridiculous glory. Mencken! Thou shouldst be living now. Your country has need of thee.