waiting for the barbarians

Longing For the Past, But Dreading the Future

By in battling personal entropy, books, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere, waiting for the barbarians

Joel Miller:

This sort of skewed picture of the past skews Horowitch’s understanding of the present, as well as her fears for the future. She credits print culture with its highest achievements (Boris Pasternak and James Baldwin, analytical thought and political deliberation) and then charges digital culture with its worst (TikTok slop, conspiracy memes, AI deskilling, and Donald Trump’s social-media posts). That’s a fake contest.

Yes, print produced everything from the Federalist Papers to the Pentagon Papers; it also produced yellow journalism, eugenics and race science, libel, red scares, and oceans of formula fiction arguably worse than the dregs of a discount streaming service. Digital media produce brain rot; they also distribute serious newsletters (hello, Substack!), digitized archives, research papers, online courses and how-tos, public-domain libraries, and more—including the very long article in which Horowitch announces the end of serious reading.

The decline of reading is real enough to lament. What interests me is the theatrical pitch of the lament: The End of Reading. The Postliterate Age. The book is not merely losing market share or cultural prestige. It is dying, chewing the scenery like mad, and perhaps taking thought, democracy, and civilization into the grave with it.

We speak differently about exercise. A large majority of Americans are overweight, sedentary, or both. Many rarely perform deliberate physical exercise. Few develop substantial strength, endurance, mobility, or technical skill. Yet no one surveys this population and announces a new portentous essay about The Death of the Gym. No one mistakes the neglect of exercise by the majority for the extinction of exercise itself. We understand that a dedicated minority will continue lifting, running, swimming, cycling, and otherwise tormenting itself voluntarily while everyone else drives around the parking lot looking for the closest space.

The minority may even flourish amid the general decline. Gyms multiply, training methods improve, small communities form around obscure sports. A sixty-year-old amateur with an office job may know more about programming, recovery, and biomechanics than many professional athletes knew a century ago. None of this disproves the obesity crisis. It merely shows that mass deterioration and minority excellence can coexist. Why is it so difficult to imagine the same future for reading?

A large part of the answer may be status. Serious readers have long regarded their discipline not merely as one worthwhile practice among others, but as the official measure of cultivation. The reader was not simply a hobbyist. He was the advanced form of the citizen. His interests were identified with reason, civilization, moral seriousness, and the life of the mind. Physical culture enjoyed no comparable presumption. The old Egghead/Meathead divide assigned the latter a lower place from the start.

Reverse the joke and the hierarchy becomes clearer. Each language learned represents a deadlift never pulled, a load never carried, a bodily capacity allowed to decay. That sounds philistine. Guppy’s version sounds witty because everyone already knows which achievement counts.

Eggheads therefore had little reason to write elegies for the decline of exercise. The gym was for sweaty, grunting illiterates anyway. The collapse of physical culture did not threaten the egghead’s rank. It may even have improved it by making the body seem still more vulgar and the sedentary intellect more refined.

The reaction resembles the response of many white-collar professionals to automation. When machines eliminated factory jobs, the ruling vocabulary was efficiency, innovation, and creative destruction. Displaced workers were told to retrain, relocate, and accept that no occupation possessed a divine right to continue existing. Once software began approaching journalism, law, illustration, programming, academia, and literature, work was suddenly rediscovered as a sacred source of identity, dignity, community, craft, and human meaning. All of that was true. It had also been true of the machinist.

The reading panic may indicate a similar injurious insult. It is one thing to discover that fewer people read difficult books. It is another to discover that reading difficult books no longer confers automatic authority — that the serious reader has become one enthusiast among many, like the powerlifter, birder, chess player, or amateur astronomer. A discipline once imagined as the center of respectable culture is becoming a subculture. Books may become less normal. Serious readers may become fewer and more deliberate. They may have to build small institutions, seek one another out, and practice their discipline while being seen as weirdos and eccentrics by the culture at large.

The meatheads have managed under those conditions for decades. Perhaps readers can — gasp! — learn something from these human oxen: show up, do the work, preserve the form, and stop mistaking majority approval for proof of life. The squat rack has endured decades without an Atlantic cover story announcing its civilizational indispensability. The bookshelf may have to learn the same humility.

To Find New Ways That Might…

By in books, bricolage, waiting for the barbarians

Books used to be an essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality. They were written by older generations and passed down to the young in a vertical transmission of culture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me. Now information moves horizontally, from young person to young person. This dynamic makes figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture. The decline of reading didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways.

Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers. A 2023 Morning Consult poll found that almost 60 percent of Gen Z respondents said they would be a social-media personality if they could. Amanda Kordeliski, of the American Association of School Librarians, is also a librarian in Oklahoma, where she has set up recording studios for students. “Podcasting is the hottest, most popular thing. I could buy a million microphones and there would still be a waitlist to get into the audio labs,” she told me. “Everybody wants to be an influencer.”

— Rose Horowitch

****

We must accept the possibility that the habit of reading is a fad, long in duration, but now in its final stages — destined to be carried on in the future only by a few devotees. Horsemanship was, for over twenty centuries, an indispensable adult skill for the middle and upper classes in Europe and Asia, much more so than reading. And yet, within the space of a century, it has become merely an elite hobby. So may it be with reading. Computers will soon become so adept at spoken language and displaying information with icons that it is possible to imagine a generation arising that does not perceive written language to be necessary for the general public for day-to-day life — as a generation has already arisen that hardly knows how to read clocks, since time is everywhere displayed digitally. Our only hope is that the pleasures of reading, meager as they are in comparison to visual entertainment, will continue to seduce a regular few and prevent reading from becoming the technical skill of scientists and history professors. But that is a gamble with perilous odds, given the inconstancy of the human libido. Did not man and horse, after all, once seem as inseparable as…well, as man and woman once seemed?

— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

****

We’ll build shrines for our loved ones
We’ll burn fires and lights
And we’ll talk of the old ways
To find new ways that might…
They just might…

— Killing Joke, “Savage Freedom“

One Wick to Another

By in books, foolosophy, waiting for the barbarians

Years ago I noticed that my own children lived more through the eye than I had done at their age, and that at the same time they did not lose themselves in books as I had done. It did not occur to me then that perhaps a general shift of attention was taking place. Now I am sure that what had happened in my family had also happened in thousands of others. These post-war years have shown us the results of this change. Whatever appeals first to the eye attracts immediate attention. The important art exhibitions, as we have seen, draw big crowds at once. Even the more modest shows, if they are fairly representative, are always well filled. More and more art books are published and sold, in spite of their high cost. There are more and more books in which the text is a mere excuse for the photographs. It is the popular illustrated periodicals that survive. People must have something to stare at, as the advertisers know. It is the demands of the eye that must be satisfied first. What was once chiefly the method of the kindergarten, to catch the attention of very young children, is now imitated far and wide, for every possible purpose.

— J.B. Priestley, “Another Revolution,” Essays of Five Decades

Ploosa shawnje, ploosa la memshows! Imagine the ecstasy of today’s cognoscenti if more and more people were buying expensive art books and crowding into exhibitions.

Priestley was not imagining the change he described. People really were becoming more visually oriented, just as phones and tablets have produced another genuine alteration in attention. But the passage is also evidence for a more sanguine view of cultural decay. Nearly every symptom he cites now looks, from our present position, like a sign of cultural health. The supposed “kindergarten method” was leading people into galleries and sending them home with books of art.

Human beings continue to find their way toward nourishing things, even when the route becomes longer, stranger, and more convoluted. Intelligent and thoughtful people keep appearing, reading what they can find, making what they can make, and influencing whoever is near enough to notice. Less cursing of the darkness, perhaps, and more attention to the scattered candles already burning.

There was never a time when people could look around and conclude that everyone was now sufficiently intelligent, judicious, and thoughtful, and that the work might safely be discontinued. The fight against mental and physical laziness is not a crisis peculiar to the smartphone age. It is the human condition. The mid-century reading culture was historically fortunate, perhaps even anomalous: a large literate public, relatively few competing media, cheap mass-produced books, growing leisure, and a cultural prestige still attached to being well-read. Once the surrounding conditions changed, some regression was predictable. Rather than ceasing altogether, serious reading lost a temporary monopoly on certain kinds of solitude, instruction, fantasy, and escape. Human interest does not simply slide downward from Tolstoy to TikTok and then disappear into the drain. It detours, adapts, finds niches, sometimes recovers through the very medium accused of destroying it.

Scott Weinrich sang, “Look at those around you / Find your better way.” That has always been the task: not merely to prescribe a better way, but to become evidence for it. No attention-deficient adolescent looks at a a bilious old man enraged by everything that has happened since 1963 and thinks, I want to become more like him. But he may notice the studious, thoughtful man who seems to know something different and more interesting, who possesses answers, or at least better questions, and wonder: What does he know, and how does he know it? Then the flame passes from one wick to another.

Profits of Doom

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians

Jacob Howland:

How can we combat misology and reclaim our logos? First, understand that the very core of our humanity is at stake. That’s worth fighting for, so we must screw up our courage for grassroots personal effort, without which we cannot count on institutional or other help. We’ll need courage to stand up to totalitarian impulses wherever they assert themselves, from campus bullies to governmental speech controls, and to relearn how to say what we think in public. We must also try to put down our phones, read good books, reclaim the meanings of high-jacked words, and seek out face-to-face conversations with family, friends, and fellow citizens. Above all, we must purge education of petty politics, and once again make the cultivation of logos a central focus of everything from grammar school through university.

UnHerd may be the ugliest website on the internet. It’s the graphic design equivalent of a vomitorium, every editorial impulse horked up unto the page and left to congeal. Content is violently expelled at the reader. I’ve seen Angelfire and Geocities websites that were more attractive. Nevertheless, we’re here, wading through the incoherent jumble of grids, sidebars, podcast tiles, and repeated modules, because, as the man says “the very core of our humanity is at stake.”

The argument begins at maximum altitude: logos is humanity itself, and misology is “perhaps the definitive characteristic of 21st-century life.” Once you say that, everything else has to become evidence of the same mega-disease. Campus identitarianism, degraded political speech, activist euphemism, Trumpian hyperbole, social media, smartphones, AI summaries, institutional cowardice, bad pedagogy — all are folded into “misology.” If humanity’s innermost being is being extinguished, if Homo sapiens is “an endangered species,” then the closing advice can’t help sounding like pamphlet boilerplate. “Put down our phones, read good books, reclaim meanings, seek face-to-face conversations” — okay, great, but after the preceding escalation, it feels like telling people to fight Ragnarok by journaling, flossing, and supporting local independent radio. “Logos” becomes another noble word floating above the mess, which is ironically close to the very linguistic inflation he is criticizing.

These civilizational-alarm essays often miss a simple point: decadence usually arrives as a series of reasonable-seeming accommodations. Each one has a justification. Each one can be defended in isolation. The damage appears only in aggregate, after enough people have made enough locally defensible choices that the original standard becomes unrecoverable. “We stopped reading books.” Well, why? Because of phones? Credential inflation? Exhausted parents? Schools that turned reading into test-prep? The collapse of leisure? The rise of streaming? The decline of religious and civic cultures? The fact that plenty of people never read much in the first place? Those are different phenomena requiring different explanations. But under the master-word “misology,” they blur into one condition: hatred of reason.

The villain story is emotionally satisfying: bad people did bad things because they hate truth, courage, books, and civilization. But that is never how institutional rot happens. A more accurate account is less theatrical: people made local decisions under pressure. They avoided a lawsuit. They placated a loud faction. They softened a standard because enforcement was exhausting. They adopted a euphemism because the old word had become socially radioactive. They let a policy slide because no single case seemed worth the fight. They accepted a little managerial language because it seemed harmless. They used AI “just this once” because the semester was overloaded. They let students read less because everyone else had already lowered expectations. No one needed to hate logos. They only needed to prefer peace, convenience, plausible deniability, career safety, or efficiency in the immediate case.

But okay, let’s pretend: I’ve read this essay, and now I’m all fired up to go out there and join the campaign for the restoration of man. I begin by reading Plato in a spirit of civilizational renewal and discover that my friends are discussing a show I haven’t watched, a meme I haven’t seen, and a group chat I muted for the sake of my humanity. I try to revive face-to-face conversation, only to find that everyone is tired, scheduled, avoidant, or vaguely suspicious of my new intensity. I put down the phone and immediately fall out of the informal commons. I object to euphemism, ideological language, or institutional cowardice, and instead of restoring logos, I become “that guy,” then “possibly problematic,” then the subject of a short, serious conversation with someone from HR who keeps using the word “impact.” Help, Howland, what do I do now? He won’t have any answers. At that point, “read books and be courageous” has reached the end of its usefulness.

Amusingly, the existence of this decline-thinkpiece genre weakens its own premise. If the West is truly drowning in boredom, hatred of logos, mass stupidity, spiritual exhaustion, or civilizational amnesia, it is curious how many magazines can still support a professional class of people elegantly announcing the fact every Tuesday. Decline may be real in some respects, but “decline” is also a content category. It has house styles, reliable emotional beats, and an audience who read, nod, share, and feel morally awake, without facing any of the hard choices. No one is asked to give up a friendship, lose a promotion, homeschool a child, confront a principal, abandon a platform, take a financial hit, or accept social awkwardness as the price of principle. The essay gestures toward sacrifice while remaining safely within the realm of approved seriousness. The prophet of decline has become one of decline’s stable professions.

Everybody Decadancing

By in crime and punishment, extraordinary popular delusions, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit, unintended consequences, waiting for the barbarians

Gary Saul Morson:

Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.

…Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—they contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual ­commitments.

Casting “unworthy, furtive glances at who liked what,” Berdyaev observed, these liberals illustrated how “moral cowardice develops, while love of truth and intellectual daring are extinguished.” Captivated by public opinion, they signed petitions they did not agree with and excused heinous acts, always observing the rule: Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone an inch to one’s right.

I thought of this nearly-six-year-old article after seeing this contemptible display from the New York Times in defense of “microlooting,” or “petty theft,” as most of us know it. Piker, as we’ve noted before, is a typical millionaire Marxist who wants to, like, burn down the system, maaan, the same system that lucratively rewarded his uselessness, and Tolentino, a New Yorker writer, is sitting pretty herself. This is the essence of the luxury belief: danger outsourced downward, righteousness retained upward. One suspects that if the dialectic ever wandered onto their own property — if someone decided to “microloot” the mansion, the brownstone, or the NYT building — the revolutionary mist would clear instantly and the old bourgeois nouns would come marching back in full uniform: trespass, theft, violation, police.

And then there is the Times, kneeling obligingly beside all this like a butler holding the tray. Disaffected radicals will always exist. Every society produces its crop of nihilists and vigilantes looking for a theory to excuse their impulses. The truly pathetic part is the abasement of a prestige institution that once at least pretended to maintain a distinction between public seriousness and fashionable degeneracy. Here the paper of record goes slumming, treating antisocial behavior as a kind of righteous Les Misérables cosplay for people with real estate portfolios. Theft becomes “microlooting.” Assassination becomes “understandable anger.” A lawyerly joke is offered at the end to imply that the speaker’s official disavowal of violence should not be mistaken for his actual sympathies.

This is how exhausted liberalism advertises its decay, by aestheticizing it, joking about it, flirting with it, and assuring itself that all this blood talk is only a game played among civilized people. But the history Morson described is precisely the history of people who assumed the same thing. Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess now seems almost endearingly innocent by comparison. She was at least pretending at rustic simplicity. These people are pretending at revolutionary virtue. Piker, with all the intellectual depth of the retarded stoner he is at heart, pronounces UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson guilty of “social murder,” which makes his actual murder, like, just a difference of degree when you think about it, maaan.

Apocryphal Mark Twain cautioned against arguing with idiots, who will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. The danger of equating every distant harm, every bureaucratic cruelty, every structural injustice to the moral equivalent of murder is that literal murder gains camouflage, prestige, and finally primacy; the real thing drags its metaphoric rivals down and beats them through sheer experience. An imbecile like Piker isn’t going to kill anyone, of course. He’s too comfortable and lazy. But he and his idiot enablers will do all they can to clear the way for people who aren’t playing games. The conceit of parlor radicals is that they can abolish moral distinctions in language without abolishing them in life. They think “murder” can remain a clever metaphor in their hands. But once everything oppressive is promoted to murder, real murder enters the room with a terrible advantage: it is the only participant not speaking figuratively. The word-game ends where the firing squad begins.

Is This Your Homework, Larry?

By in fresh hell, waiting for the barbarians

Ahahaha:

“They”? Are there no mirrors in Sabato’s house? Is there some reason he didn’t say something after having this scoop dropped in his lap, other than the same cowardice and partisan loyalty that motivated the rest of the Democrats? Oh no, not the cold shoulder!

You lied and dissembled and manipulated in the name of preventing a second Trump term, and you got it anyway. You failed your party and your country, and you irreparably stained your honor and integrity in the process. My old martial arts teacher committed honest-to-God literal seppuku in a public park after being outed as what the kids these days call a “sex pest.” He hadn’t committed any actual crimes, but, having publicly tarnished his reputation, he felt obliged to ritually atone for it. I don’t know what made me think of him after all these years…

Now That We’ve Lost All the Reasons That We Thought That We Had

By in bricolage, nihilism, waiting for the barbarians

There is no denying that we live in disturbingly anxious and contentious times. Apocalyptic assertions, profanity-laden tirades, public shaming tactics, and crude weapons of moral accusation have increasingly taken the place of rational discourse and the steadfast rule of law. There is something ominous in the air, a faint but unmistakable scent of dissolution. Even before the shamefulness of the Afghanistan debacle, still unfolding as I write, there has been a growing and justifiable disgust with the self-serving incompetence of our leadership classes, and a sense of resignation to a future of ever-growing polarization and irreversible diminution of our national self-understanding. Hard times give rise to troubled thoughts; and when the hardness of the times is in large part a product of our own folly and improvidence, the thoughts are likely to turn inward, like knives in the brain.

— Wilfred McClay, “Has America Lost Its Story?”

****

Although some of these ideals survived the war, they lost much of their intellectual appeal and cultural force. That the West lost confidence in itself was a direct consequence of the war. As Francis Fukuyama remarked, the “First World War was a critical event in the undermining of Europe’s self-confidence.” Or as Jacques Barzun observed, “the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction was the Great War of 1914-1918.”

When the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stated on the eve of the Great War that the “lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time,” he had little idea just how long darkness would last. Richard Overy characterized the decades following the Great War as “The Morbid Age,” one where cultural and intellectual life appeared to be haunted by expectation of a new Dark Age and an end to Western civilization. This was had more than the usual unsettling outcomes associated with a military conflict. It called into question the self-belief of the political and cultural elites of Western societies.

One of the most momentous and durable legacies of the Great War was that it disrupted and disorganized the prevailing web of meaning through which Western societies made sense of their world. Suddenly the key values and ideals into which the early-twentieth century elites had been socialized appeared to be emptied of meaning…One response to this existential crisis was to lament the sense of loss of the old order. But even those who possessed a strong conservative impulse understood that there was no obvious road back to the past.

The power of destruction unleashed during the Great War, with its unexpected and uncontrollable trajectory, and the failure of the intellectual legacy of modernity to make sense of this tragedy undermined society’s faith in future progress. Despite the rhetoric that this was a “War to end all Wars,”  it was widely understood that four years of slaughter did not resolve any of the problems that caused the conflict in the first place. Premonition of the war to come in the future coexisted with fears of uncertainty about the capacity of society to absorb internal conflicts. Suddenly, the taken-for-granted assumptions about civilization, progress, and the nature of change lost their capacity to illuminate human experience. The prominent English historian H.A.L. Fisher acknowledged in 1934 that he could no longer discern in history the “plot,” the “rhythm and predetermined pattern” that appeared so obvious to observers in the past. “I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave,” he stated.

— Frank Furedi, First World War: Still No End in Sight

****

Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
‘Cause I’ve noticed all the others
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going
‘Cause I feel like the real reason
Is that you’re quitting and admitting
That you’ve lost all the will to battle on

Will the fight for our sanity
Be the fight of our lives?
Now that we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had

Still the battle that we’re in
Rages on till the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses
But the thought that went unspoken
Was understanding that you’re broken

Still the last volunteer battles on..

— The Flaming Lips, “The Gash“

And This Gives You Power Over Me?

By in non compos mentis, waiting for the barbarians

If you spend any time sloshing around in the giant colostomy bag for thoughts known as Twitter, you’ll sometimes encounter a phrase, “tweeting through it.” It refers to amusing instances in which an individual, having beclowned hizzorherself, studiously ignores all the mockery and continues tweeting about other topics, hoping for the jeering crowd to lose interest and go away. This seems like a real-world equivalent. Do Western governments seriously believe they can just keep repeating the same mindless bromides about diversity and inclusion to avoid facing up to their humiliating defeat, as if these stupid notions have any purchase outside of the affluent bubble they’ve created for themselves, as if they have any leverage to dictate terms to anyone here? Yes, I’m sure the Taliban’s HR department will get right on that. They certainly wouldn’t want us to invade them again!

What genuinely puzzles me is this: who is the audience for these performative statements? Surely the State Department can’t believe the Taliban cares about Western obsessions with inclusivity and gender-equity. But then, who is supposed to be impressed by this? American citizens? After the sublime display of incompetence, ineptitude, and wishful thinking over the last few weeks, what sort of simpleton listens to this feeble rhetoric issuing forth from an administration with a desiccated, dementia-addled figurehead and feels anything other than mortification? Why do they even bother saying this? Could they actually…believe their own bullshit?

A Quiet Vineyard

By in bricolage, waiting for the barbarians

As I have remarked here in the past, the feeling that the world is going to Hell in a hand-basket is a timeless feature of human nature. The world has always been, and will always be, going to Hell in a hand-basket. Still, one pauses: after all, there was someone living an ordinary life in Rome when it was sacked by the barbarians. It’s a matter of timing. You never know what you’re in for.

— Stephen Pentz, “Presence”

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Does a Society Become Senile?

By in bricolage, eric hoffer, waiting for the barbarians

This might seem flip and ‘too soon’, but the irony highlights the real civilizational difference here: one where combat is via prissy morality and pure spectacle, and one where the battles are literal and deadly. One where elites contest power via spiraling purity and virality contests waged online, and where defeat means ‘cancelation’ or livestreamed ‘struggle sessions’ around often imaginary or minor offenses. And another place where the price of defeat is death, exile, rape, destitution, and fates so grim people die dangling from airplanes in order to escape.

In short, an unserious country mired in the most masturbatory hysterics over bullshit dramas waged war against an insurgency of religious zealots fired by a 7th-century morality, and utterly and totally lost.

And all we can do in the wake of it, with our brains melted like butter in a microwave by four years of Trump and Twitter and everything else, is to once again try and understand in our terms a hyper-violent insurgency of fanatics, guilty of every manner of cultural barbarism, now running a country with the population of Texas.

— Antonio García Martínez, “We Are No Longer a Serious People”

****

Senility consists partly in not being able to take things for granted. The old are not sure that their legs will carry them, their arms will lift, their eyes will see, their stomach will digest. Would this also be true of a society? Does a society become senile when it no longer can take familiar practices and attitudes for granted?

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Are You Talkin’ to Me?

By in jests japes jokes jollies, waiting for the barbarians

So, we spent last week moving into the new warehouse. Yesterday, four of us unloaded a 40-foot shipping container in one hour in sweltering heat. The first game of the new Bundesliga season kicked off this afternoon, with the Premier League to follow tomorrow. I’m weary and distracted, is what I’m saying, but I still have enough energy to point and laugh:

Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all.

Now, I have no serious gripes with Taibbi, who seems to be one of the few big-name journalists who has made an honest effort to retain intellectual integrity rather than allow Trump to break his brain and drive him into naked sycophancy for the Democratic party, but in the immortal words of Tonto, what do you mean “us,” paleface? Even in my younger naivete, when I considered Democrats in general the lesser of two evils, I never had any affection or expectation for Obama in particular. Anyone who seeks power ought not be trusted with it — I learned this principle sitting at the feet of the Taoist masters. Politicians may do some good, sometimes by intent, often by accident, but the idea that any of them should be thought of as heroes deserves a belly laugh, not a rebuttal. Expect nothing from them but lies, and give them nothing but invective in return. With no partisan responsibilities, I’m free to observe that the previous president was a crude reality-TV star and professional Twitter troll, the current one is a senile old buzzard, and both deserve all the insults and mockery that can be heaped upon them. Sorry for your misplaced optimism, but that’s a burden for you to bear alone, buddy.

Obiter Scripta, no. 113

By in books, obiter scripta, waiting for the barbarians

We must accept the possibility that the habit of reading is a fad, long in duration, but now in its final stages — destined to be carried on in the future only by a few devotees. Horsemanship was, for over twenty centuries, an indispensable adult skill for the middle and upper classes in Europe and Asia, much more so than reading. And yet, within the space of a century, it has become merely an elite hobby. So may it be with reading. Computers will soon become so adept at spoken language and displaying information with icons that it is possible to imagine a generation arising that does not perceive written language to be necessary for the general public for day-to-day life — as a generation has already arisen that hardly knows how to read clocks, since time is everywhere displayed digitally. Our only hope is that the pleasures of reading, meager as they are in comparison to visual entertainment, will continue to seduce a regular few and prevent reading from becoming the technical skill of scientists and history professors. But that is a gamble with perilous odds, given the inconstancy of the human libido. Did not man and horse, after all, once seem as inseparable as…well, as man and woman once seemed?

— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

To the monasteries with us, my friends!

The Revolt of the Public

By in books, media/propaganda, technology, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians

Like a python with a bellyful of pig, I’m going to be digesting Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium for a very long time. This is one of those books I loved so much I almost feel wary of it now — isn’t it suspicious to find oneself in such overwhelming agreement with an author? Has he really presented such a useful and accurate perspective on world events, or am I just abandoning myself to the debauchery of confirmation bias? Whatever the case, it’s always a delight to find that someone else thinks the same thoughts I think, only better and more clearly.

First published in 2014, this edition added an updated chapter from 2018 which considers Trump and Brexit. I only wish there could be another update analyzing last year’s virus and woke riots in relation to his thesis as well, but I suppose I’ll have to check his blog for that. Speaking of which, he writes:

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 and 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.

If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence — the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Sometimes he describes what appears to be a dialectical historical process, in which an age of widespread affluence and education paradoxically produces an equally widespread miasma of nihilistic anger. Other times, his focus is more personal and psychological, as when he attributes nihilism to “radical ingratitude” — an inability to hold realistic expectations of both human nature and of the ability of technology, government, etc. to “solve” the tragic dimension of human existence. Again, events seem to be moving too fast to be included in revised editions. In the last year alone, the utter beclowning of mainstream media, public health officials, and elected representatives has been almost too painful to watch. “Rebels” of both the right and left live in fantasy role-playing worlds of cool costumes and worn-out slogans, and have nothing to offer but condemnation and destruction. The response to this upheaval from hapless elites is to double down on demanding respect for their dwindling authority and attempting in vain to censor and control “misinformation.” But if we are in fact living through the most radical changes in media, technology and mass society since Gutenberg, the ripple effect is likely to go on for decades or longer. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to manage to avoid the twenty-second century equivalent of Europe’s religious wars.

The Unacknowledged Legislator of the World

By in fresh hell, history, waiting for the barbarians

I’ve said before, with only the tip of my tongue in my cheek, that Oprah Winfrey is “no more a person now, but a whole climate of opinion under which we conduct our differing lives.” (Yes, technically, Auden first said that about Freud, but Sigmund has nothing on Oprah when it comes to the reach of their respective pernicious influence. I’m confident that W.H., were he around today, would agree with me.) Now, with the news that Oprah is going to bring the risible 1619 Project to film and TV, it looks like she’s going to add pseudo-history to her legacy, in addition to the pseudo-spirituality and maudlin therapeutic sensibility she’s already known for. As if we weren’t already close enough to living in Idiocracy.

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

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.

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part. Don’t Let It Kill You, Baby, Don’t Let It Get to You

By in foolosophy, waiting for the barbarians

Brad Warner:

In any case, more alarming statistics and other such reports are not going to do me any good. I’ve put myself on a media blackout for the time being. I trust that the information I actually need will find its way to me. It always has before.

Contrary to the scurrilous rumors being spread by my enemies, I did not wish upon a monkey’s paw for more time to spend reading and writing. Nevertheless, supply chain disruptions have led to my workload being temporarily lightened by about fifty percent. Unfortunately, that’s the fifty percent that we actually get paid for. Three weeks without income is something of a bracing jolt for a small business, but whuddayagunnado? Things will work out, unless they won’t. That’s how it’s always been before. All we can do is stick to the common-sense routines: drink a bottle of Purell every day, make sure the moat is fortified with alligators, and keep the cauldrons atop the walls filled with boiling oil.

Glancing around the web, I see that most people have united around the one thing we all hold in common, namely, the conviction that this pandemic proves, beyond any doubt, every political dogma I’ve been banging on about for the last three decades. I’m no different, of course. This pandemic proves, beyond any doubt, that most media, social and otherwise, is worse than useless, that most people have very little of interest to say but prefer chattering to silent reflection, and that it would be better to sit down with a book than add my own voice to the incessant, frenzied din. My greatest fear is that, once things get more-or-less back to normal, the only shared frame of reference our juvenile culture will have is Marvel movies, and thus we’ll see countless comparisons of that time we couldn’t leave the house to search for nonexistent toilet paper to that time Thanos “snapped” half of the universe into oblivion. There are some things worse than death.

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