the great awokening

Après Nous, Le Déluge

By in free speech, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, tribalism No Comments

Kevin D. Williamson:

“Cancel culture isn’t an assault on freedom of speech,” the dishonest argument of the moment goes, “It is free speech.”

That isn’t really true, inasmuch as the entire point of “cancel culture” is to limit and suppress speech, which is nonetheless limitation and suppression when the tool used to accomplish it is speech, of a sort, if we are liberal enough to define “speech” as including the beef-witted grunts on Twitter. Cancel culture is not discourse but antidiscourse, a genre of speech intended not to facilitate the exchange of views and ideas but to prevent such an exchange. It is free speech in the sense that shouting down a speaker is free speech.

“Cancel culture doesn’t exist,” say the exact same people who, in recent years, denounced men, #yesallmen, for being under the malign influence of an evil spirit they called “rape culture.” But as Scooby-Doo and the members of Mystery, Inc. repeatedly demonstrated, most of these phantoms, when unmasked, reveal the all-too-human face of tribalism and motivated reasoning. It has certainly become trendy in recent years to target people’s jobs and reputations in order to enforce progressive orthodoxy and create a climate of fear (as even Noam Chomsky attests). But underneath it all, it’s the old simian urge to harass our peers into conformity and punish them for dissent. That urge is ancient and relentless, like the sea attempting to reclaim the land. Legal rights to free speech and freedom of association can’t create a dike by themselves. A principle of charity is also necessary, akin to Keats’s negative capability: an ability to rest easily among heterodoxy without any irritable reaching after retribution and enforced obedience. Without that, symbolic actions like the Harper’s Letter are just fingers in the dike, delaying the inevitable.

Don’t Know Your Past, Won’t Know Your Future

By in the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds No Comments

To be more precise, this is what happens when mobs form, regardless of the supposed reason for their formation. “The joy of violent movement pulls you under,” as James Hetfield sang. Mobs, by their nature, are thoughtless, destructive beasts. Arguing about whether this is all in response to police brutality or systemic racism or three months of lockdown is like arguing about which flea on the elephant’s back is responsible for steering it. In one sense, a careful study of history could possibly inoculate people against the mob virus, by reminding us how little we know, by illustrating how little actually changes throughout history, and by instilling in us humility and gratitude for the past achievements of those wiser, better, and more courageous than we’ll ever be. On the other hand, one doesn’t have to look far to find many conventionally-intelligent people who have managed to study history without learning anything important, except for how to cherry-pick grievances to fuel their insatiable resentment. Anyone who looks into the face of the mob hoping to see a reflection of reason and idealism will only find the abyss of impulsive nihilism gazing back at them.

Cleanup In Aisle Twelve

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, george carlin, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

I don’t believe there’s any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can’t completely ignore.

— George Carlin

Kevin D. Williamson:

More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.

…Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.

George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. But Kathleen Kingsbury — do I have to tell you she’s from Portland? she’s from Portland — has moved up a step at the New York Times, and promises not to publish any opinions someone might have an opinion about. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.

They always come for pop culture eventually. When I was an adolescent, the crusade du jour was about putting parental warning labels on records with “explicit content,” a worthless gesture intended to vaguely relieve the widespread anxiety caused by the complex problem of broken families and latchkey kids. I can’t help but recall that the effort was spearheaded by a well-off white woman, the wife of a soon-to-be Vice President. Today’s purgeoisie (credit to Neontaster for that coinage), confronted with intractable social ills, has risen to the challenge by disarming mass murderers like Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam, decolonizing the breakfast table, and using national newspapers as a platform to publicly humiliate private citizens for once wearing blackface, even when it was done in the spirit of parody against the earnest wearing of blackface. When we roll up our sleeves, there is no ambiguously-symbolic representation tangentially associated with something which could conceivably be construed as “bad” that we can’t dispose of in short order.

We Are the Thing of Shapes to Come

By in race, revillaging, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds 4 Comments

Kevin D. Williamson:

The imbeciles on Twitter are unserious people, but unserious people can produce serious problems. There is a word for the situation in which there is no room for disagreement. The word is not “justice.” It is “totalitarianism.” That is what cancel culture is, and we have seen it in highly developed form in such places as East Germany under Honecker and China under Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

A couple days later, Williamson linked to an interview with the high priestess of the state religion of anti-racism, Robin DiAngelo, in which she informed us:

Racism is the foundation of the society we are in. And to simply carry on with absolutely no active interruption of that system is to be complicit with it. And in that way, we can say that nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.

Ah, yes, “Everything within the cause, nothing outside the cause, nothing against the cause,” as Mussolini might have said, had he been willing to interrogate his own whiteness. I’ll bet you that DiAngelo has one of those motivational office posters hanging up in her workspace emblazoned with O’Brien’s promise from 1984: “We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” However, things aren’t as harsh as they seem. They’re at least willing to pay for our therapy and retraining:

Look at it this way: this might be the only way we’re allowed to go to summer camp anytime soon. If any of you get assigned to my cabin, let’s start a clandestine reading group.

I had managed to make it this far in life without ever hearing of this carpet-chewing lunatic, which I take to be a healthy sign for both me and society in general. I think it’s noteworthy, however, that he has 331,000 followers. It gives slight pause to consider that the population of a fair-sized city could encounter a Streicher-like screed like this and say, “Now, there’s a fellow making good sense. I’d like to be kept abreast of all his further thoughts, please.” Signal? Noise? Who can tell anymore? Is this feverish sentiment a meaningless outlier, or an ominous harbinger?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is no such thing as a happy political junkie. I have never once encountered a person intimately familiar with everything from palace intrigue to policy minutiae who could be described as well-rounded, genial, or content. Political obsession invariably deforms its victims. They can’t change their minds and they won’t change the subject. A healthy person would be indulging in a hobby, or enjoying time spent with loved ones, not fantasizing about throwing political opponents in re-education camps, or preaching the good word of anti-racism to people who are inching the door closed in your face. The fanatic is convinced that his monomaniacal political awareness is the gravitational force keeping the world from falling apart. In reality, it’s more like a magnifying glass being used to burn a hole through the delicate bonds of “sympathy” as described by thinkers like Adam Smith, the fellow-feeling which makes life tolerable despite its countless imperfections.

Like Bartleby, I look at most of the activities that society offers me and offer a polite demurral. I would be happy to leave it at that, but apparently my attitude is increasingly unacceptable. I’m tired of being pursued by zealots who want to paw me with their dirty institutions and constrain me to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. I will vote for whoever promises to build a wall between me and fanatics like DiAngelo and Palmer, a wall topped with razor wire and machine-gun turrets. We used to be able to depend on the much-more aesthetically-pleasing bulwark of manners, mores, civil society, or whatever else you want to call it, but the religious vacuum in society has been filled by politics-as-religion, so here we are.

I Do Not Want to Remain Silent About My Morality

By in revillaging, socmed, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds No Comments

And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you. You will also wish to help – but only those whose distress you understand entirely because they share with you one suffering and one hope – your friends – and only in the manner in which you help yourself. I want to make them bolder, more persevering, simpler, gayer. I want to teach them what is understood by so few today, least of all by these preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The Editors:

We would prefer that people be treated with grace rather than opportunistic cruelty and with charity rather than pettiness. We would prefer that employers not appoint themselves the moral guardians of every employee and the censor of every employee’s every utterance in his private life. And here is something close to the fundamental issue: We believe in private life, that people are entitled to their own associations and opinions (even bad ones!), and entitled to make their own mistakes, too — and that, barring some direct connection to work life or extraordinary circumstance, that none of this is the concern of the little platoons of finks lurking down in human resources.

We worry about the consequences of cancel culture. But we are much more intensely ashamed of it and what it says about the current state of the American heart.

The Mighty Boosh? Seriously? Good thing I already have the DVD collection. This is partially why I still prefer to own physical copies of media rather than trust the cloud to always have it.

Let me state some basic principles. I assume, in keeping with my Taoist influences, that anyone who seeks political power is probably a budding sociopath who ought not be trusted with it, and that if they manage to do something good while in power, it’s probably by accident. I think that politics is a necessary evil, emphasis on the evil, one of the most unsatisfying and soul-destroying activities in human existence, and that only defective people pay more than the bare minimum of attention to it. I think that the desire to leave and be left alone is the mark of a healthy mind, and I think that the entire spectrum of authoritarians, from neighborhood busybodies to cultural commissars, should be energetically abused with the most hair-curling, obscene invective possible. I try, to the best of my abilities, to do what the man said with my limited influence and share not suffering but joy: the books I appreciate, the music I love, and the most interesting thoughts I can muster up. It’s saddening and worrisome that so many people can think of nothing better to do with their time and energy than act like vengeful petty tyrants, haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, is having an unapproved good time without their supervision. The Venn diagram between people who want to abolish/defund/etc. the police and people who pleasure themselves to the thought of having police-like powers to arrest and punish others for thoughtcrimes is a circle.

I’m reminded of an interview with Michael Ignatieff about Isaiah Berlin, one of my intellectual heroes:

IL: Yes, they are. But back to Berlin. You say that he was highly sceptical about the Aristotelian idea that people are “political animals”. Is it possible nowadays not to be a political animal? How possible is it to stay out of it all?

MI: One of the freedoms that Isaiah valued, which is not very popular, was the freedom not to be a political animal. The luxury of a truly free society is that political involvement is a choice, not an obligation.

IL: That may be true regarding active political involvement, but there is also the argument that you may not be interested in politics…

MI: …but that politics may take an interest in you. Oh, sure, sure. And he understood that. He understood that the freedom to be disengaged was possible only in societies like the British one in which he lived in for most of his life. Whereas there are other societies where politics taps you on the shoulder or knocks on your door and can carry you away. In that case, involvement becomes compulsory, in the sense that it’s a matter of your survival and your dignity. He understood that. But a good society, I think, is a society where politics leaves you alone and where you choose to get involved or not. I think he was right to say that there are a lot of things that shouldn’t be politicized. Healthy societies are societies that don’t politicize everything. You choose the best judge, not the politically well-placed judge; you choose the best director of the orchestra, not the one with the best political friends; you choose the best editor for a magazine, not the one who has political connections. If everything is politicized, then everything becomes a zero sum game between those who are in and those who are out. Smart societies just don’t do that because it means you don’t get the best people.

I think it’s safe to say we are not a good or healthy society, and in the current climate, it’s only getting worse. The woke Maoists who are busy seizing everything from the opinion pages of the NYT to the downtown streets of Seattle have made clear that neutrality is not a valid option in their vision of class war. Sure, they’re just drunk with revolutionary fervor right now, but even in slightly-calmer times, the ratchet only seems to turn one way, in the direction of increased politicization. Social media has always brought out the worst “revillaging” aspects of people’s personalities, and organizing boycotts/cancellations has been a favorite sport of authoritarians for as long as I’ve been reading online. But if there’s any sign that the general public has lost its appetite for this madness, let alone become nauseated by it, I haven’t seen it yet.

Irony of ironies: I wish there were an actual “resistance” I could join in opposition to the hashtag version.

Is This the Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? Caught In a Landslide, No Escape From Reality

By in non compos mentis, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds No Comments

I’ve been told by many people that social justice cultists will eventually grow out of it once they get into “the real world.” (I thought that myself at one point.) I’ve been told that political correctness is just Fox News/Koch brothers propaganda, and that real power in “the real world” is held by ruthless realpolitik types (who are invariably “right-wing”). I’ve seen ostensibly-adult women working themselves into a frenzy over the imminent threat of Mike Pence and his shadowy network of fundamentalist allies making The Handmaid’s Tale into reality.

But here we are. It doesn’t get any realer than a global pandemic. Push has come to shove. The rubber has met the road. And when it mattered most, what I saw wasn’t snake-handling fundamentalists in positions of power telling me I could pray the virus away and socially mingle in large groups as long as I was right with Jesus. It was Ivy League epidemiologists and public health officials speaking the fundamentalist language of critical race theory, telling me that anti-racism has disinfectant properties, telling me that the spiritual need of guilt-ridden white people to gather in public and seek absolution from their privileged, racist sins took precedence over the need to protect the non-white people who, let’s recall, were reportedly being affected in higher proportions. It was the professional explainers at Vox telling me that “many have decided the risk is worth it,” after having stressed for months that your individual assessment of risk was not the point, that it didn’t matter what you personally were willing to risk; your actions would inevitably harm more vulnerable people who didn’t choose to take that risk. It was those same public health officials who decided that the comparatively-insignificant problem of single, maybe double-digit deaths from police violence was a “public health crisis” of equal magnitude to the virus which has already killed more than 100,000. But lol, nothing matters, least of all words.

And here we are. Everything takes a backseat to the insatiable need of progressive whites to indulge their performative, expressive individualism. From declaring a virus moratorium to their deeply-serious calls to “defund the police,” the “real world” exists as a backdrop for them to act out their puerile fantasies and neurotic obsessions. I could use a consoling bedtime story about how the forces of corporate conservatism are secretly in charge of everything, please.

You Leave Me No Choice But to Plot My Revenge

By in the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds, waiting for the barbarians 2 Comments

John Hirschauer:

Everyone you know has a “good reason” to break quarantine. Some wish to bury a relative, while others want to visit a lonely elder in a nursing home. Parents want to baptize their children to save their souls, and first-generation college students want to attend graduation. All of them were told to abstain from these things in the name of public health. Following those orders had human costs — rates of domestic violence increased during the lockdowns. Calls to suicide hotlines skyrocketed. Millions were thrown out of work. Businesses built over generations filed for bankruptcy, Some will never recover.

By nature and design, I’m one of those “whose only aim is to observe how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of other men’s lives, in order to judge and regulate their own,” as Montaigne put it. I live my ordinary life doing ordinary things, and when I have some spare time, I like to amble out to my little blog-porch here to sit a spell and watch the world go by as I mutter to myself about it. Most of the time, I maintain an amused, ironic distance from it all. Even the great Covid pause hardly made a difference to me personally. Our health and business are fine, and our routine is back to normal tomorrow with our gym reopening. I’m as comfortable and content as a person has any right to be.

Over the last several days, though, I admit I’ve felt uncharacteristically angry and despairing. I feel like I’ve just watched an enormous stockpile of social capital go up in flames while a bunch of gibbering idiots danced around it, oblivious to what they’ve done in their imbecilic glee, and I’m still stunned.

Not by the riots and literal flames. That’s horrible, of course, but I’ve never been under the illusion that civilized behavior is anything but a thin crust over the fault lines of dangerous passions. No, it’s the good old trahison des clercs that’s so unforgivable. The damage to the cities will last for decades; some of them haven’t fully recovered from the last round of urban rioting. How much longer will the damage to the crumbling remains of moral/intellectual/professional authority last? There’s nothing even remotely defensible about this ridiculous about-face.

Again, I hardly consider myself one of the trumpenproletariat. I don’t spend my time consumed with resentment for “coastal elites.” But what else are we supposed to conclude from this? Oh, I see. We all need to spend three months under house arrest. We need to give up everything for the greater good, the common sacrifice. The SCIENCE™️ said so. Did your small business expire after being asphyxiated for weeks? Andrew Cuomo helpfully tells you that maybe you should get a job in an “essential” field. Economic hardship isn’t death, after all, and if anyone knows about death, I suppose it would surely be the motherswiver who forced nursing homes to accept Covid patients before suffering the glaring scrutiny of…a goofball interview with his somehow-even-more-useless brother, who apparently cosplays as a cable news anchor when he’s not staging fake endings to a quarantine he didn’t even abide by while infected. Rules are for little people; we’re busy creating reality TV spectacles here and burnishing our personal brands.

And all of it was for nothing. Even epidemiologists and other public health officials have to pay obeisance to the Church of Anti-Racism. Even The SCIENCE™️ lies awake in the wee hours in a cold sweat at the thought of being accused of racism on social media. You can’t catch the plague if your cause is righteous enough, apparently. Never mind the fact that all this protesting is an after-the-fact reaction that changes nothing and will prevent nothing in the future. The cop responsible was quickly arrested and charged. What are we supposed to do as a response to the vox populi, arrest him harder? Charge him with double murder, triple murder, infinity murder? More useless theater for the sensation-addicted, more reality TV for people who find the nuances of professional wrestling too ambiguous. What’s most important of all is demonstrating that we’re the good people and we’re going to progressive heaven. My doctor’s office has been sending me emails since March saying I shouldn’t come anywhere near the premises without a hazmat suit lest I contaminate the staff, but the staff of a NYC hospital can walk outside to applaud a protest? Siiigh, says Charlie Warzel, NYT opinion writer. How exhausting it is for poor Charlie and the rest of the credentialed class to have the commoners persist with these impertinent questions, like they think they’re owed an explanation. How dare you expect me to abide by an eight p.m. curfew during looting and rioting, says the bint who accused Georgia of conducting experiments in “human sacrifice” for attempting to re-open the state.

Privilege is being children of the cultural aristocracy and getting to cosplay as sans-culottes. Privilege is being able to destroy other people’s property and have media intellectuals bend over backwards to make excuses for you. Privilege is affecting to despise the fruits of capitalism while you pop them one after another into your gaping maw. Privilege is being able to declare a bacchanalia in the midst of the worst public health crisis in our lifetime and know that the consequences will be borne by others. And in the most amazing of coincidences, that sort of privilege is the exclusive property of the very people who claim to see it everywhere else.

And If You Need a Little Heat In Your Face, That’s What I’m Here For

By in jests japes jokes jollies, the cult of multi, the great awokening, the madness of crowds No Comments

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

— George Orwell, Inside the Whale

“I’m sorry for endorsing destruction of poor people’s housing. That was not my intention. If it were rich people’s property, that would be all right. Not mine, though. Stay out of Beverly Hills, you savages. Uh, you know what, here, let me just hand this over to my P.R. agent to finish up.”

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”

― Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories

Sooner or Later You’ll Be a He-Man Woman-Hater

By in conspicuous crusading, gender, media/propaganda, non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Sometimes, you just have to admire the sheer brass ovaries.

Look, I’ve been alive and paying attention over the last decade or so. If there were any feminists publicly questioning or criticizing the increasingly-fanatical direction their crusade was taking, I somehow missed them. If there were any critics of the simple-minded slogans of intersectionality who were granted a respectful hearing by our media class, I somehow missed them. The only people who dared speak up were publicly canceled, in the parlance of our times, while being slandered as misogynist rape apologists doing the bidding of their right-wing paymasters (man, those guys are behind everything). If there were any clear guidelines about how to distinguish credible accusations from scurrilous ones, they were never publicly articulated. Talk of “due process,” however tentative, was considered a “dog-whistle” of the patriarchy.  Way back in 2014, Scott Alexander analyzed what was becoming an already-obvious compulsion among feminists to pick the absolute worst hills to die upon:

The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?

What’s really amusing is that he probably thought “some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists” was such a perfect reductio ad absurdum that it might serve forever as a rhetorical guardrail, preventing anyone from plunging over the edge into lunacy. That guardrail only lasted, what, five and a half years before Ms. Faludi barreled through it in an eighteen-wheeler, all hopped up on the trucker’s speed of ideology and propaganda?

Now, like many aficionados of the human comedy, I have certainly enjoyed the recent spectacle of the scuttling of the good ship #MeToo in the name of political expediency. Your revolution is over, Faludi. Condolences. The broads will always lose. It’s like one of the Three Stooges with a bucket on his head; you can see it coming from far away, but it’s still funny to watch. In fact, I think I enjoy this reboot of the franchise even better than the original version starring Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and all those other ’90s stars.

But let’s be fair. Contrary to what some have claimed or implied, #MeToo was never a purely cynical exercise in political partisanship. After all, it did bring down a powerful Hollywood Democrat and a sitting Democratic senator. It just turns out that a presidential election is simply a bridge too far. No one is willing to chance losing to Trump again for the sake of principles. Suddenly, idealists see the attraction of lesser-evilism. If we were mature adults, we could talk about this. We could admit that part of the tragic nature of existence is the fact that we’re frequently forced by unchosen circumstances to sacrifice our principles to necessity. But we’re not mature adults, Linda Hirshman’s example to the contrary. We’d rather avoid the up-front pain of facing our compromises squarely and choose the no-money-down, balloon-payment option of investing far, far more time, effort, and pain into denying that there was ever a tragic conflict in the first place, let alone any chastening compromises. We’d rather descend into farce and blame an all-powerful cabal of our enemies for playing some incredibly disciplined long game to manipulate us into this situation so that we can pretend our moral virginity remains intact.

And for what? Who does this benefit? She and her comrades know full well what sort of message they were relentlessly pushing. Those “right-wingers,” real, honorary, and imagined, certainly remember. Absolutely no one is fooled by this, though some will find it useful to pretend to be fooled. And yet, some idealistic part of me is still shocked, no matter how often and predictably this happens, that people would rather go through more trouble to lie than to cut through all those tangled webs and just tell the truth. I can’t help but laugh at the irony that my own feeble idealism would survive after theirs had sold out.

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