The Labor We Delight In

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Simon Sarris:

This is not worship of employment, but a simpler observation: It seems that the more you ask of people, and the more you have them do, the more they are able to later do on their own. It is important to note that while we shouldn’t allow children to be bobbin boys, no one would describe Steve Job’s summer job at 13 as his exploitation. We should be thinking much harder about making sure children can make meaningful contributions to the world.

Seizing opportunity requires opportunity to exist at all. And I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people. Ushering everyone into an endless default script is disastrous when underlying conditions or assumptions change. Even when they don’t, some people exit academia almost terrified to leave (to interact with the “real world”), a kind of Stockholm syndrome. How could we celebrate a higher learning that creates something so pathetic, the opposite of a readiness for life?

A couple who work for us brought their eleven-year-old niece along during her spring break this past April. It was her idea, something she was excited to do, and she seemed to really enjoy it. We gave her simple tasks like opening incoming parcels, but whenever she finished, she would repeatedly ask if there was anything else that she could do. At the end of each day, on her own initiative, she’d sweep the floor with the big push broom. By the end of the week, she was proud to have become competent, if not quite a master, at operating the pallet jack, although she was a little too small to maneuver it with a full load on it. It was interesting to see how eager she was to be given responsibilities. She saw it as getting to participate in something with her aunt and uncle, which just happened to be “work.” I have to admit, I don’t think I would have been nearly as motivated at that age; I would have preferred to wander off by myself to play or daydream. The Lady of the House often talks of wishing she had an army of teenage girls to carry out tasks for her. I remind her that when confessing to being the reincarnation of a robber baron, it’s best to use one’s inside voice.

I started work on my fifteenth birthday in my father’s newspaper distributorship. He had been talking about it for several weeks prior, telling me to be ready to wake up early one of these Sunday mornings and go in to the warehouse. A few weeks went by without anything coming of it. I went to bed the night before my birthday thinking, “Well, surely he won’t pick tomorrow to follow through on that…” Naturally, I found myself in a cold concrete room with hazy fluorescent lighting at three a.m. helping to assemble the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Back then, the Sunday paper came in about four or five different sections — the main, or front page section (“heads”), sports, and a couple others whose names escape me now. One person would insert these sections together and pass them down to a partner, who added the “combos,” the ads and such which gave the Sunday paper its heft, and passed them on to be tied in bundles of ten. I played the combo guy to Jesse’s inserter. That man was a machine. Frederick Winslow Taylor would have whimpered ecstatically in his sleep to dream of such a man on his assembly line. He assembled four sections together faster than I could add one. It was quite the unwelcome lesson in humility, especially with my dad barking at me to pick up the pace.

Nowadays, I’m grateful to my dad for instilling a strong work ethic in me. I still have no desire to manage a warehouse crew composed of teenage girls, though. They’ll have to find some other way to the joys of self-fulfillment through hard work.

Back to Naked Land

By in jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

Karl Steel:

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, rich, strange, and Scottish, died at eighty-four in 1799. He was known for exposing himself: he exercised naked before the open windows of his estate and eschewed travel by carriage, insisting instead on riding his horse Alburac through the damp gray of every Scottish season. Like many other men of his ilk and era—Rousseau, Condillac, Mandeville—he speculated at length about language’s origins among our primeval ancestors. He maintained, incorrectly but not unlaudably, that fully articulate speech first appeared in the Black civilization of ancient Egypt; that certain Native American languages were mutually intelligible with Gaelic; and, most notoriously, that orangutans were humans, though just too lazy to learn to speak.

This reminded me of Bernarr Macfadden. What is it about eccentric Scotsmen and their penchant for exhibitionist exercise? Is this some sort of strange offshoot of the Scottish Enlightenment? I think this bears further investigation. If any budding scholars need a topic for a dissertation, there you go. Take it with my compliments.

The Invisible Dinosaur

By in foolosophy No Comments

In a famous psychology experiment, subjects were asked to watch a video in which six people pass basketballs back and forth. Three of the people in the video wore white shirts, three wore black. The subjects were asked to keep a silent count of the number of passes made by people wearing white shirts. In the middle of all this, a person in a gorilla suit wanders through the scene, spending nine seconds on screen, even facing the camera and pounding its chest. Surprisingly, half of the subjects never even noticed the gorilla, so intent were they on their counting task. I have to admit, I would have expected to be one of the noticers.

On my way to an appointment this evening with a few minutes to burn beforehand, I stopped in the library to return some books and pick up another one. As I walked in, I noticed the table with free masks and wondered for a moment if we were required to wear them in here, or if it was just strongly encouraged. I decided to follow the adage that it’s always better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, but I glanced around and noticed a few other maskless people, which reassured me that I wouldn’t become a martyr for the Free Face movement. I went over to the hold rack, picked up my book, and then went across the room to the new non-fiction shelves. While browsing around, I saw a couple come in with a young girl, maybe four or five. Also maskless, I noticed. Soon, the girl’s squeals of excitement vaguely disrupted my laser focus on book titles, and I glanced up and saw it — an actual Triceratops skeleton, right there in the middle of the floor, mere feet away from the hold rack where I had just been. There’s a new natural history museum being built nearby, and we had read that the library would become the temporary home of the Triceratops in the meantime. The Lady of the House had even said to me, a mere fifteen minutes earlier as I left the house, to “see if the Triceratops is in the library yet!” Yes, dear, go to my appointment, pick up a few things at the grocery store, check on the dinosaur skeleton, uh-uh, gotcha.

As a kid, I was, like many kids, a dinosaur nut. I’ve only been to the Smithsonian’s natural history museum maybe four or five times in my life, certainly not often enough to become jaded by the presence of the mortal remains of a giant horned animal the size of a tank. Assuming that some part of my subconscious mind was aware of the skeleton and recognized it as such, rather than just another one of the pointless sculptures that typically adorn public properties, how was I not arrested by the sight? How quickly we become habituated to the most incredible things! A dinosaur stands before me, and all I’m noticing is the presence or absence of a fabric rectangle on people’s faces. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Only the Dirt I Do Believe. Divinity Vanishes Among the Leaves

By in atheism, religion, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Jonathon Van Maren:

“I know I can’t achieve religious faith,” he went on, “but I do think we should go to church. We don’t have, I don’t think, an evolved ethical system. I don’t buy the idea that evolution alone gets us to be moral. It can modify behaviour, but there’s just too much evidence that in the raw, when the constraints of civilisation fall away, we behave in the most savage way to one another. I’m a big believer that with the inherited wisdom of a two-millennia old religion, we’ve got a pretty good framework to work with.”

For one of the most prominent historians in the world—himself an agnostic—to say that we should go to church is rather startling, but Ferguson’s sentiments also appear to be part of a growing trend. The late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton began attending church himself despite struggling with belief, regularly playing the organ at All Saints’ in Garsdon. His secular friends say his faith remained cultural; other friends were not so sure. What we do know is that he thought Christianity was in many ways the soul of Western civilisation, and that the uniquely Christian concept of forgiveness was utterly indispensable to its survival.

My rude opinion is that Ferguson’s attitude has little to do with religion per se and more to do with the intelligentsia’s belief that the masses of yahoomanity need to be guided and instructed by the proper authority figures, namely, themselves. The Grand Inquisitor for thee but not for me. The same dynamic is in play in the media environment — has the New York Times or CNN done anything to earn our trust and respect? Does anyone believe they’re devoted to truth? No. Quite the opposite, in fact. But nonetheless, we’re in the middle of a mediacentric moral panic over how civilization will collapse if the masses stop listening to them and start worshiping the golden calf of podcasting. Communication technologies, like it or not, have eroded the possibility of any particular institution, whether religious or political, commanding the same sort of respect and authority that it once did. People, even the modern-day equivalent of peasant villagers, know too much and are emboldened to ask impertinent questions. Leaders and institutions have disgraced themselves too badly for too long. Clay feet can’t stay hidden in the age of the smartphone. All of the old unifying myths are losing their power.

Will this all lead to chaos and possibly bloodshed? Almost certainly. When has human history not ended up there? But with postmodern fragmentation, as with most things, the best way out is through, wherever that may lead. Christianity can’t clone itself into the future, but traces of its DNA will still be evident in its descendants. With any luck, that will be good enough.

Thank You, Willis Carrier

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Charles C.W. Cooke:

During the 1911 New York heat wave, baked city-dwellers did everything they could to cool down. They slept outside — on their apartment’s fire stairs or in Central Park. They soaked their clothes in water. They even licked large blocks of ice that, despite being covered in flies, the saliva of hundreds of random children, and whatever had come off the back of the horse that dragged it there, were deemed preferable to the alternative. This summer, with them in mind, let’s resolve to hear no more of this silliness, and instead to recite an ancient prayer each and every time we get up from the couch to set the thermostat to a livable 70 degrees: Thank you.

I don’t have anything to add that I haven’t said before. I just wanted to shout Amen. July 17th should be a national holiday.

How to Read a Book

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

Luther Ray Abel:

The perfect reading nook exists, I am sure of it. I am confident because I have experienced this nirvana personally. Let me tell you, it feels as if one is supping from the very vessel used during the Last Supper — provided you choose the correct chalice, of course. While many have explored this path before, searching for superiority in literary comfort, and found naught but personal ruin and destruction, the recipe for peak hard- or soft-cover consumption is quite simple. One only needs a plush wingback chair — along with, ideally, a warm fire and a purring cat (or a snoozing dog) nearby.

What, no pipe? Or would that have been a bit much?

Close your ears against this false prophet, friends. This setting is designed to produce naught but narcolepsy. My own counsel would echo that of Lin Yutang — reclining at about a 30-degree angle in bed, propped up on pillows or one of those reading cushions shaped like the top half of a chair. A fire? I’m sorry, am I only allowed to read during the months from November through March? It’s ninety degrees and humid around here; crank up the air conditioning (praise Willis Carrier) and settle back with a book propped on your chest, the way God intended.

There’s Still Something Left for You

By in music 3 Comments

As an amateur scribbler, one of my biggest challenges is how to derive inspiration from contentment. It’s easy to write in an exhortatory, critical, or angry state of mind. When life is great and everything’s in its place, though, comment seems superfluous. The closest thing I had to a deep thought this week was how much I appreciate unseasonably cool days in the summer — the sun is up early, the landscape is blooming and buzzing with abundant life; topping it off with chilly mornings and comfortable days is about as good as it gets. Maybe a true artist can turn that sentiment into something people might enjoy reading, but I’m afraid I lack that ability.

Luckily, Isaac Brock seems to be one of those rare talents who can channel contentment and mellowness into compelling songs. Modest Mouse’s new album, The Golden Casket, was released yesterday, and Brock seems to have achieved a serene perspective that he credits to being a new father — “Once you’ve brought people into the world, it’s necessary to figure out ways to make things better for your brood, to make things work. You can’t be too fucking cynical — it’s only right.” The virtue of moderation, the sheer miracle of being alive, the unfathomable mystery of a complex universe, the necessity of optimism even, or especially, when things look dark and hopeless — these themes recur in song after song, with Brock’s usual penchant for memorable lyrical imagery (“Our head is a cage, and the parrot loves to talk”). He, along with Neil Fallon from Clutch, is one of the two people in contemporary rock music whom I feel approach genuine poetry in their fertile, suggestive lyrics.

I’m a relative latecomer to their music, having only started listening to them in the early aughts, around the time of their hit record, Good News for People Who Love Bad News. One benefit, I think, to discovering an artist with an already-existing back catalog, is the ability to see both the strong and weak points within a coherent whole. The diehard indie fans from the late ’90s tend to treat each new evolution of the band’s sound as a betrayal; mainstream normies like myself are able to be a bit more equanimous. Stereogum, in reviewing their 2015 record Strangers to Ourselves, sniffed about the band’s “Whole Foods-backyard-BBQ era,” which, for those of you unacquainted with the vagaries of status and fashion, is not a compliment. (It’s like musical chairs — if you pause to ask why and when Whole Foods and backyard BBQ became hopelessly lame and uncool, you’ve already missed your chance to grab a seat, and everybody’s laughing at you.) A recent Twitter thread displays a common sight: indie music snobs attempting to elevate their personal taste into a Spenglerian iron law of decline and decay. (Perhaps the problem isn’t that the band’s sound has changed for the worse; it’s just that you expect them to continue making you feel the way you did when you were an angsty adolescent, and those days are long gone.) I’m sure The Golden Casket will add more tarnish to whatever indie credibility the band still retained, but for those of us who aren’t plagued with self-conscious anxiety over the simple pleasure of straightforward happiness, there’s a lot to enjoy here.

Dusty Mummies

By in antisocial media, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit No Comments

I did not know that Antonio García Martínez had a Substack, but he does, and he interviewed Martin Gurri on it last year, and as with all things Gurri, it’s a good read:

Human knowledge is much more limited than we like to admit. To shape the flux of events into a story that will persuade the public, therefore, the elites must control the means of communication. When that control slips, the elite class lapses into a state of crisis. Every major transformation in information technology has brought in train widespread chaos and disruption, often accompanied by bloodshed, as the old elites – wedded to obsolete forms of communication – were chased up their castle towers and heaved out the window. The most disruptive innovation of this nature was surely the printing press. It inspired revolutions in religion, politics, and science.

At the present time, we are in the first stages of a gigantic transformation from the industrial mode of information and communication to something that doesn’t even have a name yet. It’s an extinction event for the narratives. The ideal of representative democracy is in trouble, for example, and the institutions around that ideal will have to be reformed if they wish to retain any sort of legitimacy. But every possible ideology that might challenge representative democracy is even more discredited. Putting aside old threats like fascism or Marxism-Leninism, which are museum relics, there is no great cry among the global public for the “Chinese model” or Putinism, and Islamism seems to have sputtered out.

The causes, I repeat, are structural, and not dependent on the creativity of the elites. Today, even George Washington and FDR would be roasted alive over the fires of social media. Not surprisingly, the people in charge of running things are terrified of saying anything at all – it might come back to bite them. In a Darwinian sense, they are selected for the ability to use words that have no meaning.

The sterility of the ruling class in the production of meaning, in turn, has paradoxical consequences. Crude and incoherent versions of worn-out ideals like socialism and nationalism briefly regain currency, and are said to be the next big thing: amid the panicked babble of the elites, we watch these rough dreams slouch towards Bethlehem to be born again. But there is no second coming. History has never sponsored reruns of dead ideals, even as sitcoms. The appeal to the corpses of once-powerful ideologies itself is evidence of our exhausted powers of explanation, and these dusty mummies, dragged up by the swirl of surface effects, will almost certainly be swept away in the great transformation.

Was the Triumphant Answer to Be This? The Pilgrim Way Has Led to the Abyss

By in extraordinary popular delusions, fresh hell, gender, race, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit No Comments

I think what I love most about these incidents is the way they neatly refute the conventional belief in linear political “progress.” Things constantly change; sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes progress decays into regress. The fact that the very people who think of themselves as the vanguard of “progress” can work themselves around to endorsing racial ideas that would have been acceptable to any Klansman, or gender fashions that would appeal to any genuine misogynist, is just amazing. As a student of the human comedy in all its absurdity, you have to love it. I can just imagine traveling back in time to explain to my 18-year-old self that the political left would soon be urging people to discriminate against one another by skin color, or crusading for the right of men to dominate women’s sports. The ceaseless itch to be “moving forward” or “doing something” just leads to going round and round in circles.

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