the statusphere

Your Words, Once Heard, They May Place You In a Faction

By in fresh hell, notorious jbp, the statusphere No Comments

Matthew Walther:

I realize that I will probably be accused of breaking a butterfly on a wheel here. Admiral McRaven doubtless means well in a tough-talking sitcom high-school assistant principal sort of way. If he were working in a vacuum, I would say live and let live. But Make Your Bed is only one example of a flourishing genre of pseudo-hardass commentary that is exercising a massive influence over young men in the English-speaking world. Like McRaven, the Canadian academic psychologist-turned-YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson seems to be under the impression that rote performance of mundane tasks (“Clean your room” in the professor’s case) coupled with a kind of vague meta-obsession with purpose for its own sake is a catch-all solution for any number of postmodern afflictions. Joe Rogan, the tattooed podcaster whose stock-in-trade is telling his followers what they should think about whiskey and the keto diet, is another.

I have no doubt that the Petersonists are responding to a real need felt by their audience. The question is whether their answers are the right ones. I am not at all convinced that what lonely disaffected male millennials need to hear most is that performative masculinity will make them feel happy or fulfilled. As I write this, there are hundreds of thousands of American men who, under the influence of these no-BS masculinist gurus, have learned to confuse selecting the perfect razor and using it correctly with a sense of vocation. It is all of a piece with the alt-right; indeed as far as its political ramifications go, it might as well be considered the same phenomenon — a retooled social conservatism in which the issues at stake are not abortion or same-sex marriage but complaints about whining SJWs and “political correctness.” The average Petersonist is teaching himself how to use tools and getting really into evolutionary biology and lifting and will tell you all about it over a cigar or a glass of bourbon in his backyard (assuming that he has one).

One of the most tiresome things about the age of “hot takes” is what I think of as “performative quibbling” — making the most of trivial disagreements in order to distinguish oneself. As far as I can tell, the only thing that truly unites these, uh, “Petersonists” is that they put too much emphasis on the necessity and benefits of personal discipline for Walther’s taste (though they also have large audiences, which naturally stirs envy, especially among hack writers for online political tabloids). If that makes them “alt-right” — a term which has clearly become utterly worthless due to rhetorical hyperinflation — then I fear a lot of us will find ourselves classified as Nazi-adjacent before long. At any rate, Walther goes on to assure us that he does have concerns about the robustness and capability of young men today, but if he has a better answer for them than the, uh, Petersonists, he couldn’t squeeze it in under his word count. Milquetoasts to the left of him, meatheads to the right; in between, in the “reasonable middle ground,” stands our hero, thoughtfully stroking his chin, gazing off into the middle distance, sighing over the sheer complexity of it all. I’m reminded of an old XKCD punchline: “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.”

It Is Not Meet That Every Nice Offense Should Bear His Comment

By in art, bread and circuses, the statusphere No Comments

Will Lloyd:

Romain Rolland once complained that ‘there is too much music in Germany.’ Today there are too many television critics in the world. Some of the finest writers of multiple generations spend most of their writing lives recapping last night’s television. Is any of it really criticism, or are thousands of words agonizing over, say, Don Draper, adding up to anything more than the digital equivalent of chip wrapping?

…Imagine living in a world where Mrs Dalloway and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon exist and thinking that Game of Thrones (which is entertaining, don’t get me wrong) is a work of art. Then imagine making a career out of typing up little takes about it. And then imagine this defining your career as a critic!

Critics who only write about shallow subjects will only produce shallow writing. How television became the most critically examined art form of our century remains a baffling mystery.

Even worse, imagine being an enlightened critic who has scaled the heights of True Art and nonetheless is compelled to hawk his bloggy wares in the marketplace like any other word-merchant, forced to take his cues from whatever the fishwives are yakking about today! Is there no dignity? Is there no honor? Ah, fie, fie upon’t.

I’ve never watched Game of Thrones. However, in one of those strange twists of fate, I have seen almost all of the Marvel movies in the last few months. I didn’t plan this. No, seriously, I swear on my sainted grandmother, last December, I suggested to the Lady of the House that maybe it would be fun to read Shakespeare together. Out loud, on winter evenings, sitting around the fire, and all that. Somehow — and I’m not clear on the precise details — that project morphed into me reading Shakespeare and us watching the MCU productions together. (Cue Henry Higgins singing, “But let a woman in your life…”)

I kid, I kid. For me, popcorn entertainment falls under what the Stoics called “preferred indifferents.” It’s not something I would normally seek out, but it’s not something I’ll make a pretentious spectacle of refusing, either (in this case, when the movies are available for rental at the library we’re already patronizing, sure, why not). I have little patience with those who stack the deck by assembling a greatest-hits compilation of artworks from the previous few thousand years, comparing it to the last few years of pop culture, and sniffing about what a tragedy it is that they should have been born in such a pigsty of an age. I’m of the more sanguine opinion that there is uplifting and ennobling work to be found in many surprising places if you work hard enough to look for it. Profound conversations about perennial themes of human nature can sprout from humble origins, like Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, willing to sacrifice love to his “ends justify the means” vision of a grateful universe in “balance” under his enlightened oversight. Some of the Marvel movies were indeed terrible, but then again, some of Shakespeare’s work doesn’t recommend itself for re-reading either. That’s not an endorsement of relativism in aesthetic judgment, of course, just an assertion that your antiquarian taste alone won’t get you into heaven.

When we last left Mr. Lloyd, he was connecting tendentious dots to claim that Marvel movies were somehow slightly responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It may be ad hominem, but I can’t help but wonder sometimes: when so many people like this come across as bitter, sour, old cranks, why am I supposed to be motivated to contemplate the things they insist I should? Whining and complaining is repulsive. Okay, so you spend your time marinating in the most sublime art ever produced. Is it because of or despite that that you appear to be a stuffy, humorless scold? I understand from reading this that Mrs. Dalloway and Barry Lyndon are the sorts of books and movies I should be enjoying if I want to be thought well of by curmudgeonly critics, but if there are good reasons for doing so, he couldn’t be bothered to elaborate here. All that does is encourage the all-too-common scourge of signaling. Like CliffsNotes for social climbers, these dyspeptic rants provide cues without context. It would be far better to write a paean to the art you love rather than moaning that other people are enjoying the wrong things, but it turns out that even our moral betters are prone to finding fault rather than providing a better example. I find that one of the most tedious characteristics of conservatives, both political and literary: too much darkness-cursing, not enough candle-lighting. It’s easy to get the impression that they’re not lamenting wasted intellectual and imaginative potential so much as the disappearance of a cultural caste system that favored them.

I Made a Pilgrimage to Save the Human Race

By in foolosophy, identity, ohferfucksake, the statusphere, walking 2 Comments

James Jeffrey:

“To walk the city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it,” Self says. “The contemporary [walker] is by nature and inclination a democratizing force who seeks quality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control.”

Self makes the point that there are two types of walking. The first, such as walking to work, has an obvious objective, and the second, walking simply for the sake of it, serves “as a resource that can refresh us physically, aesthetically and even spiritually.”

Self writes about the surrealist poet Louis Aragon, who, drawing on foot-bound ventures around Paris, described how the walker could, if sufficiently alive to nuances of place and atmosphere, experience the “moment.” This, Self says, is the “ambulatory equivalent of the sort of insights the surrealists believed they received from dreams, séances, automatic writing and other methods they used to short circuit the deadening influence of rationality.”

But increasingly we are boxing ourselves in with rationality, data, and sheer laziness. Self notes that with each passing year, the number of journeys taken on foot declines. At the current rate, walking may die out as a means of transport by the middle of this century.

I ask, as I have so many times before, what is it about the utterly ordinary act of walking that turns people into such insufferable wankers?

We spent last weekend walking around the university and its surrounding streets and footpaths. It’s one of our favorite things to do. Whenever our business travels take us to a university town, we like to spend a couple hours in the early morning strolling around campus and downtown with only the birds, squirrels and chipmunks for company. That’s in addition to the mountain hikes we also enjoy. I say all this in the hope of establishing my ambulatory bona fides so that you won’t be too dismissive when I tell you that all this romantic rhetoric about the mystical salvation to be found on foot is no different from any other marketing manure. Walking is an enjoyable activity in and of itself, but it’s not a cure for the tragedy of the human condition. Before the first step, or after a thousand miles, it makes no difference. You’re still going to be largely the same person with the same weaknesses and problems.

When luxuries and comforts become too widespread and easily obtained, the only way for snobs to distinguish themselves is to pretend that they’re privy to a secret truth hidden in plain sight, unavailable to the uninitiated. When possessions are too common, you start selling experiences. People, being a social species, naturally feel insecure and uncomfortable when others snub them. Oh, no! Is it because my armpits stink, or because I haven’t appreciated the right art in the right way while partaking of the right travel experience? Either way, there’s someone waiting to sell you the temporary answer. No one is ever content where they are; we’re always easily convinced that lasting satisfaction lies elsewhere, and thus spend our time pursuing carrots dangling from sticks attached to our bridles. An article like this doesn’t exist to share the subtle pleasure that a long walk can bring; it exists to make you feel anxious about the degraded state of the world, afraid that cool artists like J.G. Ballard and Will Self might see you as one of those simple-minded, suntanned wage slaves, and desperate for reassurance that an ecstatic alternative exists to the ordinary chore of getting on with life as best as you can. Walk on, dear reader, walk on.

Me and My Friends Sell Ourselves Short but Feel Very Well

By in eric hoffer, santutthi, the statusphere, work, Ω No Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

The kind of person we seek, said the personnel manager, is the one who is perfectly content with his living wage and to do the same thing over and over again. If an applicant showed the faintest sign of ambition, he was immediately rejected.

We are inclined to look down on or even despise people without ambition, but unless we want a world in which everyone is frustrated and resentful, we need them, these unambitious types without special talent. We do not want frustrated geniuses shining our shoes or stacking shelves in supermarkets.

There is nothing wrong, then, with mediocrity and lack of talent. It is an essential ingredient of the human mix. Where it becomes dangerous is where it is combined with ambition, as it seems to be nowadays. The world pullulates as never before—or so it seems to me—with the mediocre who are avid for power.

In his diary, Eric Hoffer noted that the education explosion and advanced technology had produced “hordes of educated nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up being mischief-making busybodies.” He obviously hadn’t seen anything yet. Now, there are millions of educated nobodies who think of themselves as pundits, policy advisers and budding celebrities. It’s only my subjective recollection, of course, but when I was coming of age, it seemed like the widely-shared understanding of the good life was to have a rich inner life — if necessary, in stark contrast to an unremarkable outer appearance. Maybe these things move in predictable cycles, and the early ’90s was just the valley in between the hyper-political peaks of the ’60s and our current decade. It may have been somewhat romantic to scorn wealth, fame and power in favor of personal meaning and modest contentment, but I’ll always prefer it to the contemporary “engagé and enragé” ideal.

Battle Lines Being Drawn?

By in conspicuous crusading, the statusphere No Comments

T. Greer:

Let’s be clear about what is happening here. When Wagner accuses Bari Weiss and company of writing their apology tweets and correction letters in order to signal thoughtfulness and moderation, she is excusing herself from any need to actually engage with Weiss et. al. The same is true for most of the “virtue signalling” critiques lobbed at the left: to label an argument a virtue signal is to discredit it without actually having to respond to it. Why would you respond to it? The signaler is not arguing, but maneuvering. Their words are not written in good faith. Their appeals to reason are merely a clever gloss for strategic, self-serving behavior. Reason is a vain pursuit in a world where all reasoning is a slave of narrow self-interest.

As a rhetorical strategy this is extremely effective. This is why we have seen it spread from the right’s ideological fringes, to the centerpiece of conservative critique, and now to leftist attacks on the center. But there are consequences for intellectual life dominated by a theory that no person’s words mean what they say they mean. When words have been reduced to a mask for status seeking, signalling worth, dog whistling, securing privileged interests, solidifying tribal identities, or what have you, then words have been reduced to mere tools in a competition for domination. It is foolish to think they will not be treated as such.

This is a good post. I’ve been chewing on it for a week now. And while it’s always useful to be reminded of the need to be charitable toward intellectual opponents, I’m not entirely convinced by his argument that accusations of “virtue-signaling” are equivalent to the Marxist notion of false consciousness and equally destructive to reasonable debate. Primarily, this is because, for Marx and his doctrinaire followers, class was an immutable, objective characteristic as determined by scientific analysis. Your interests as a bourgeois or a proletarian were defined by class identity, not personal choice or idiosyncrasy. The borders of identity, like the eventual physical borders of Marxist countries, were closed.

In contrast, virtue-signaling is about the effortless and cost-free demonstration of one’s place on the “right side of history.” It’s about individuals striving to keep up with an ever-changing definition of radical chic. The definition of chic is fluid, not fixed, and today’s cool kids are tomorrow’s lame embarrassments. As Kristian Niemietz observed, why does one pundit receive fawning praise for proudly proclaiming herself a communist on TV, while a student group is considered to have committed a faux pas by specifically praising Stalin’s Gulag? If a communist is a communist, how else can one explain this without recourse to the vagaries of fashion? What are people responding to if not the style in which the sentiment is expressed? To accuse Ash Sarkar of virtue-signaling isn’t to say that she “doesn’t truly believe” she’s a communist; it’s to accuse her of using the term aspirationally while not taking it seriously. She’s wrong for thinking that communism can somehow be separated from its history, and she’s contemptible for flirting with it, but no one is claiming that it’s objectively impossible for her to do so because she’s a media figure and not a factory worker.

The modern version of Marxist false consciousness appears in the form of identity politics, where your ideas and interests are assumed to be determined by your race, class, gender, etc., and you are treated as an interchangeable widget in a demographic category. Virtue-signaling, however, describes a frivolous space where ideas and words are little more than brand logos, separate from their real-world consequences. No personal epiphany or act of will could ever allow a bourgeois shopkeeper, let alone an aristocrat, to become a proletarian. No heterosexual white man can ever be truly woke, no matter how often he flagellates himself for his privilege. By contrast, accusations of virtue-signaling are intended to embarrass their targets into recognizing their hypocritical superficiality and changing their behavior. “Pardon me, but your social-climbing slip is showing.”

If Aristotle was correct that virtue is the mean between two vices, virtue-signaling denotes a lazy attempt to claim the benefits of virtue without doing the work or paying the costs. Russell Brand, the imbecilic British celebrity, is virtue-signaling when he writes a book advocating for some vaguely-defined revolution while giving interviews in which he melodramatically proclaims his willingness to die for the cause. He wants the gravitas of a savior or a martyr, but he isn’t about to seriously inconvenience himself to attain it. Should he actually move to Venezuela and become a guerrilla fighter in an attempt to preserve the dying embers of Chavismo, though, well, he would still be a contemptible idiot, but at least he couldn’t be accused of only caring about looking cool among his celebrity-entertainer peers.

To reiterate what I said years ago, to get any profitable use out of the term, I think it’s best to understand it as being specific to social media. As Greer notes, the behavior of trying to project and manipulate a certain image of oneself has always been around, but the thing we call “virtue-signaling” emerged from a specific context. It’s built on the recognition that social media has created a cultural space for the expression of opinion with a low barrier to entry. We thought talk was cheap until we invented tweeting. Now, any idiot with a smartphone can participate in a worldwide hashtag conversation. The value of having edgy political opinions has plummeted. How does one distinguish oneself in a flooded marketplace? As with all fashions, the distinctions will seem irrational to an outsider. Why is this hemline in but that one is out? Why is it cool to say “I’m literally a communist!” but gauche to say “Actually, the Gulag wasn’t that bad”? The distinction has to seem arbitrary; if it were logical and predictable, anybody could crack the code and appear cutting-edge. And the performance of virtue has to become more creative to stand out. Anybody can feel bad about injustice, but only a select few can wear that look well and receive praise for it.

Greer is concerned that when we lose the ability to argue under the assumption of your opponent’s good faith, we’re on a slippery slope to using force to resolve our differences. I do take the possibility seriously, but as I said, I’m skeptical that this is where we’re headed. I think that with social media, we’ve created a space for people to indulge en masse in fantasy. To me, Sayre’s Law describes the teacup-tempests of our social-media age — the rhetoric is so vicious because the stakes are so small. I don’t think that many people truly believe in the possibility of radical political change, let alone desire it. I think both the tiki-torch Nazis and the Antifa goons still expect their Amazon Prime deliveries to be waiting on the doorsteps of their suburban homes after they’re done brawling downtown. I don’t think any of the media figures caterwauling about fascism honestly expect to have secret police kicking in their doors. Everyone takes for granted the stability of the political system, which allows them to waste their time on romantic fantasies of redemptive violence and heroism. Lord knows there are plenty of pathologies to diagnose in the body politic, but I don’t think this particular concept is one of them.

Obiter Scripta, no. 46

By in books, obiter scripta, the statusphere No Comments

I suppose one of the reasons for being well informed on everything is so that one can have an opinion on everything…No one is more opinionated than an intellectual. I am an intellectual. (Finish the syllogism on your own.) One of the delights of being an intellectual is that one is expected to have opinions on everything while incurring responsibility for nothing. But for the formation of these opinions at least a smattering of information is required.

Alas, on an increasingly wide range of subjects, I find I am perfectly pleased to be without any opinion at all. On so many political questions, social scandals, academic disputes, I find my antipathies nicely riven down the center, which makes forming an opinion favoring one side or the other a bit difficult. Besides, opinion generally — and my own in particular — has come to seem less and less interesting to me. A human being, after all, is not an op-ed page; the least impressive of thoughts are formulated in the personal equivalent of editorials.

— Joseph Epstein, “An Extremely Well Informed SOB,” Narcissus Leaves the Pool

Once our basic needs are met, most of our social energy is devoted to cultivating, protecting and enhancing our status. For a certain educated, socially conscious type, opinions are the currencies that buy distinction, even (or especially) if they have no practical value. Without an impressive portfolio of au courant opinions, you might as well just be another mindless beast being led around by the nose. You never know; one day, a powerful figure might suddenly vacate hizzorher position, and you might be called upon to step up from your life as an understudy and cast a deciding vote, give an epoch-defining speech, or sign off on a momentous plan of action. Boy, wouldn’t you feel foolish then if all you had done up to that point was quietly tend your garden!

Oddball Draws His Water From Another Well

By in bonsai minimalism, santutthi, socmed, the statusphere No Comments

Self-loathing Twitter is a consistently popular genre. But this candid admission is why, despite all the perfunctory flagellation, I don’t really think the sporadic “back to the blog” mutterings we’ve heard in recent months will ultimately amount to more than another type of status-signaling, sort of like the Day of Unplugging. People who want to be in the conversation but not of it will continue to use Twitter self-deprecatingly, allowing them to have it both ways, pretending to be above the attention and adulation they wallow in.

Dan Cohen says “ambient humanity” is what keeps people yoked to the giant platforms; I prefer to reiterate that people are always eager to avoid effort and agency, happy to drift down to the lowest common denominator while ironically lamenting their weakness. Quality, not quantity, right? I’m far more flattered by the fact that a few people silently show up here every day to see what I’ve written than I would be by thousands of likes, retweets and attaboys from people who just see me as one more ephemeral content provider to help them kill time at work. The satisfaction of a post well-written is its own reward, regardless of how much attention it gets. I always thought this was self-evident, but it turns out I’m just odd. Thank God for that.

Left Hand Path

By in extraordinary popular delusions, political philosophy, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere No Comments

Damon Linker:

On the other hand, the policy agenda favored by nearly everyone on the American left resembles more than anything else the political, social, and economic arrangements that prevail in northern Europe, and especially in Denmark. Is Denmark a socialist country? If it is, then there is no meaningful distinction between socialism and liberal democracy — at least when the liberal democracy has a generous welfare state and a modestly regulated, mixed market economy. Given the political history of the United States, doesn’t it make more sense for the left to understand itself, and to explain itself to voters, by making connections with the Democratic Party’s own record of advocating for just such an expansive form of liberalism (rather than “socialism”)?

What the left really seems to want is a return to the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a New Deal 2.0 for the 21st century.

Well, yes. To the extent that the American left can be said to have any serious ideas and proposals for achieving their objectives, as opposed to a vague collection of postures and grievances, it seems clear that they’re motivated by nostalgia for the decades between the New Deal and the Great Society. Of course, those golden years produced a generation of spoiled brats who were convinced that they had grown up in a tyrannical dystopia that needed to be burnt to the ground, so, given that human nature hasn’t dramatically changed in the meantime, I’m not sure why people think we’d be any more likely to appreciate a reinvigorated welfare state this time around. Still, though, it’s true that most of the inane chatter about “socialism” is either fear-mongering or status-signaling. The invasive managerial state grows in tandem with technological sophistication toward a Brave New World future regardless of which party is in power. Like generals fighting the last war, political junkies rehash century-old arguments over socialism and laissez-faire as if it’s relevant. Even the wispy fantasy of a Danish-style social democracy dissipates on contact with cultural and demographic realities.

Yet, as Kristian Niemietz has observed on his side of the ocean, people who used to claim to only want to see their society become a little more like Scandinavia or Germany have held a finger to the prevailing cultural winds and started signaling their affinity for something more extreme. (Thankfully, we seem to be behind the trend over here.) Sure, Owen Jones and most of his fellow Guardianistas have always been fatuous fools. And sure, despite the fact that it would be impossible to imagine teen and ladies‘ fashion outlets fawning over anyone who proudly proclaimed herself on TV to be a national socialist (“I’m literally a Nazi, you idiot!”), it’s also clear that Sarkar is embarrassingly ignorant about what she’s actually saying; she’s only bright enough to recognize a high-status opinion that will win her praise from her peers. But slippery slopes have to start somewhere, and the bromides that pass for received wisdom among cultural elites seems like as good a place as any. Why are we, especially those of us who don’t believe in any sort of Whiggish progression to history, supposed to rest assured that experiments with extreme leftism could never happen again?

Which brings us to the real point — as Jordan Peterson was recently wondering, what is the limiting principle of the left? How far is too far in pursuit of equality? Why do so many people still believe in some Platonic ideal of “true” socialism, existing outside of space and time, independent of all the failed attempts made on Earth to realize it? Why are we supposed to believe that a New Deal 2.0 would be enough, and not a springboard for a renewed drive to eliminate all inequalities? Regardless of how overblown the rhetoric surrounding socialism may be in our political environment, one can still be wary of the unreconstructed left-wing longing for utopia. Too bad our fellow travelers never had to go through the equivalent of denazification after the fall of the USSR.

Obiter Scripta, no. 41

By in obiter scripta, the statusphere No Comments

It is true that in certain acute and painful crises of oppression or disgrace, discontent is a duty and shame could call us like a trumpet. But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards not so bad. The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.

— G. K. Chesterton, “What Is Right With the World“

Sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, discontent is a means of distinguishing oneself. I have higher standards. I see further and deeper. I am too profound to be distracted or mollified by superficial baubles. To be happy with simple pleasures is to risk appearing a simpleton, or worse, to risk being forced to acknowledge how much one has in common with others. Most of our modern prophets are simply trying to reassure themselves of their own uniqueness in matters of both morality and taste.

This Good Old Man Appears to Me to Have Chosen for Himself a Lot Most Preferable

By in conspicuous crusading, the statusphere 2 Comments

Sam Dolnick:

It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.

James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore.

He knows none of it. To Mr. Hagerman, life is a spoiler.

…He said that with some pride, but he has the misgivings about disengaging from political life that you have, by now, surely been shouting at him as you read. “The first several months of this thing, I didn’t feel all that great about it,” he said. “It makes me a crappy citizen. It’s the ostrich head-in-the-sand approach to political outcomes you disagree with.”

It seems obvious to say, but to avoid current affairs is in some ways a luxury that many people, like, for example, immigrants worried about deportation, cannot afford.

The Lady of the House has a business acquaintance with whom she keeps in intermittent touch via social media. This woman — let’s call her Shelly — is, to judge by her newsletters and Facebook updates, a thoroughly unpleasant person. Each post is brimming over with typical performative spleen-venting about the sociopolitical outrage du jour, and supplemented with performative wallowing in angst/situational depression. Naturally, like all the other #resistance! nonconformist freethinkers, she looks like she was rolled off the assembly line in a social-justice shrew factory, complete with bright yarn-colored hair, hipster eyeglasses, ugly tattoos, and t-shirts emblazoned with feminist slogans. Being terrible people and known thought-criminals, the Lady and I of course laugh at each status update, treating it like a guilty-pleasure TV show. How long until this dunce finally figures out that she’s using “wokeness” as an excuse to flounder in self-inflicted misery? we keep asking after every episode.

Anyway, back to Erik Hagerman, the subject of this aghast NYT profile. This was one of the most unintentionally hilarious articles I’ve read in some time. Avoiding current affairs is a, surprise surprise, privilege! Don’t you know there are information-starved citizens in Africa who would gratefully gobble up all that social media ephemera you’re wasting? Now, to be clear, countless ordinary people live lives of prosaic local and personal concerns without ever paying the slightest attention to the dreadfully important issues of, uh, pussy hats and D.C. insider gossip, but the Times is gravely concerned because Hagerman is a former corporate executive at Nike, Walmart and Disney. It’s all well and good for hoi polloi to busy themselves with trivia and leave serious matters to their betters, but if an Important Person calls shenanigans on the whole charade of being an informed, cosmopolitan citizen, it cuts straight to the heart of the clerisy’s flattering conceit that they matter. External enemies are always necessary for maintaining the faith, but heresy corrodes it from within. We can tolerate, indeed, we require a large outgroup of proudly-ignorant Trumpenproles to define ourselves against, but if one of “us” stops performing the rituals and ablutions of being well-informed and suffers no adverse consequences, what does that say about the rest of us? Make no mistake, the fear is not that society will collapse if a small minority of citizens stop paying attention to news they can’t use, the fear is that the lack of dramatic consequences will prove the utter emptiness of this whole media-class pretense. Like Shelly, Dolnick and the clucking hens he appeals to for sympathy are deeply invested in consuming the very garbage that makes them sick, but they find that preferable to having to face their own insignificance.

Look at the list of “newsworthy events” that Dolnick lists up there. Ask yourself, how many of those have profoundly changed anything about the way you view the world? Did Parkland or the unsolved Las Vegas shootings change your views on gun control or reinforce them? Has any of the skulduggery surrounding Trump and Russia changed your political principles and allegiances or just reinforced them? When was the last time you read anything that made you stop at length to rethink your most basic attitudes and commitments, if ever? For most of us, the ideological foundations of our worldviews were cemented in place long ago; all we’re doing now is laying more bricks on top of them to keep us safe and dry. None of you are going to donate money, time or energy to political causes (especially those of you who are too busy tweeting to have time for anything else). None of you are going to do anything other than vote for the same political party you’ve always voted for, no matter how they perform. Go ahead, read a few more articles about subjects you only half-understand and can’t meaningfully act upon anyway. Send a few more vituperative tweets and posts into the void to convince yourself that you’re “doing something.” Alternatively, you could get over yourself and go focus on something that makes you feel pleasant for a change. Quietly tending to your own garden would do far more to make the world a better place than sharing your ill-informed, dyspeptic tirades with the rest of us. But you’d rather have attention and adrenaline rushes, wouldn’t you?

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