So I Blame This Town, This Job, These Friends, The Truth Is It’s Myself

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy No Comments

Chris Stirewalt:

But then I remember that my problem isn’t distraction, my problem is procrastination, as every editor I have ever had would readily attest. I have to fight the urge to be a digital Prufrock who measures out my life with hands of cards. But the app and the phone aren’t the problem. I am the problem.

I was very good at wasting time before iPhones, even before there was an internet. I wasted enough time playing actual cards with human beings in college that I probably could have added another major. I built model ships, tried to beat my own record for bouncing a tennis ball on a racquet, memorized National League batting statistics, went to see the same movie in the theater as many as 10 times, and always, always, always there was my best friend, television.

I don’t pretend that there aren’t serious disruptions attendant to Americans carrying their narcotizing devices in their pockets with them instead of having to go home and supplicate themselves before the glowing screen. Nor do I mean to suggest that there aren’t consequences from entertainment that can be tailored to every individual’s preferences. Media that concentrates interests and turns us inward necessarily turns us away from each other. Network television, for all its vacuousness, was a shared national experience and sometimes exposed us to ways of life other than our own, even if in caricature.

But I do mean to remind us that we had already been conquered by electronic media before we started carrying little computers in our pockets. But the devices did not create the desire for entertainment as anesthesia. We have always wanted all we could get, and we were already getting more than we needed before Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in October 2007.

The Lady of the House got an audiobook copy of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows from the library over the summer. One morning over breakfast, she said to me, “It’s amazing how accurately you had this book pegged even though you never read it!” Well, I’m not being falsely modest when I say that it didn’t take any great insight to see the popularity of that book as just another example of a perennial truth about human nature: most people are desperate to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own lives, and other people are happy to sell them ersatz absolution. I’m not religious, but reading about Buddhism since adolescence has steeped me in the understanding that we always want to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else — anything other than what we’re doing right now. You either continue chasing your tail like that, or you reflect on this and start practicing different habits. Those are your options.

Some Kind of Monster

By in fresh hell No Comments

John Ehrett:

At the heart of this tale is the longstanding question that has followed the franchise since its origin: are human beings born into wickedness, with some incarnating the darkness in a particularly destructive way? Or are they made monsters by circumstances? The series has veered uneasily between these poles, never really settling on a single answer. Here, at last, we get a straightforward reckoning with the question — and a conclusion, of sorts.

That approach may irritate those longing to see Myers back in action as an eldritch, immortal predator. But Halloween Ends is decidedly an earned conclusion, one that dares to treat its own franchise as more than just a trashy slasher saga. Director David Gordon Green, to his credit, clearly believes this story can still have something to say, something perennial — and if the cost of serious-mindedness is a slightly lower body count, so be it.

Mr. Ehrett appears to be imagining a Platonic ideal form of this film, because the version that I actually saw is steaming hot garbage. I mean, I don’t pretend to have high standards for this sort of thing, but this wasn’t even bad in a good way; it was just plain awful. The only good thing about it is that it led to me discovering the Pitch Meeting series of videos by ScreenRant. Here, just in case any of you are tempted to follow me into the schlocky depths, let me save you the trouble:

Stuck In the Middle With You

By in eric hoffer, juxtapositions, political philosophy No Comments

The middle class is the least elitist ruling class we know. Not only is it wide open to all comers, but it aspires to a state of affairs in which things happen of themselves and regulate themselves. Unlike any other ruling class, the middle class has found it convenient to operate on the assumption that if you leave people alone they will perform tolerably well; and under no other ruling class have common people shown such willingness to exert themselves to the utmost. It is this fabulously productive, more or less self-regulating chaos of a society that has given the modern age its singular spirit and set it off from all preceding centuries. Regimentation and minute regulation are as ancient as civilization. Small wonder that elitists of every stripe—aristocrats, Marxists, Fascists, priests, power-hungry intellectuals—have viewed middle class society and the modern age as abominations.

— Eric Hoffer, The Spirit of an Age

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The middle class has an important role to play, and it can side with one faction or the other depending on the circumstances it finds itself in. A typical representative of this group might be a highly successful small business owner living in a suburb of a major metropolitan center. He is alienated from the left because it looks down on him for devoting his life to something as boring and small minded as fixing central heating systems instead of overcoming the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. As with the proles, the middle class does not have the bandwith to keep up with political and artistic fashions. While the lower class can’t because it lacks the inherent intelligence to do so, the member of the middle class might be smart enough, but he is either too busy working and forming a family or not very inclined to chase status through the cultivation of certain opinions and aesthetic preferences rather than making money.

…Yet while the Merchant Right is a major force in elections and even governing, it is not one of the major participants in the culture war. This is because the true antagonism is between the upper and lower classes. The middle class (in many cases, the wealthiest class), has more money than the lower class, but its entire identity does not revolve around feeling morally superior to or lecturing the latter. Not being reformers, they just want to be left alone. This stops them from being too angry at either the urban elite or the proles, which prevents the cycle of mutual hostility from starting. Moreover, the two natural elite classes, being of similar levels of intelligence, have more in common with each other than either has with the proles. They socialize and intermarry, and the boundaries between them are more fluid.

— Richard Hanania, “A Psychological Theory of the Culture War“

Showbiz Kids Making Movies of Themselves, You Know They Don’t Give a Fuck About Anybody Else

By in juxtapositions, media/propaganda, writing No Comments

Therein lies the root of the evil that Perez is trying to exorcize. It’s not that the literary world arbitrarily decided to cede all its power to white Brooklyn ladies. It’s that white Brooklyn ladies are the only ones who can afford to be in the literary world. Perez is right that the obsession with elevating marginalized voices only extends to voices who are reciting the expected talking points. He’s also right that the literature of quiet masculine despair is out of style right now (though I predict it will come back around). But he’s off when he says the publishing houses don’t want to hire black female editors and other actual “marginalized” people. On the contrary, the houses would love to hire any such person, almost regardless of their competence level.

But people from marginalized backgrounds don’t go into publishing. They can’t afford to. Working in publishing requires being paid a salary that is not at all commensurate with your education level and cost of living. Being a senior-level editor requires wearing nice clothes and living in or near one of the most expensive cities in the country while, in many cases, earning less money than a postal carrier in Cleveland. It often requires breaking into the business by doing an unpaid internship and then taking an entry-level job that requires supplemental income from your parents. There are exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions). But by and large, if you are the first generation in your family to go to college, you are not going to become a book editor or a literary agent. You are not going to get an MFA or run an indie literary journal like Hobart, much less be a (probably unpaid) editor at one so that you can quit in protest and then tweet about it. You’re going to get an engineering degree or go to law school.

— Meghan Daum, “Who Killed Creative Writing?”

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If journalists once fought the powerful on behalf of the powerless, in twenty-first century America, they are the powerful. While the average pay for a journalism job is quite low at around $40,000 a year, that’s because entry-level jobs pay so little; at the higher levels, journalists now make quite a bit more than the average American. More importantly, journalists now have social and cultural power, and they are overwhelmingly the children of economic elites. After all, to even be able to make it on $30,000 a year while living in the most expensive cities in America (the only ones left with a functioning journalism industry, thanks to the rise of the Internet and the collapse of local newspapers), you have to come from a family with enormous economic privilege who can help you out. Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

We Are All Actors In This Life

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions, lin yutang No Comments

Sometimes people tell me I have “heterodox” or “dissident” views. The first term is favored by classical liberal and centrist types, while the latter is often used by right-wingers, who are also prone to calling themselves “heretics.” These words have always made me cringe, and it’s probably useful to explore why. My general feeling is that there is usually no legitimate justification for using them, as they encourage a kind of unreflective tribalism, lead to alienation and self-pity, and distract from what could be more productive debates.

A healthy marketplace of ideas should keep the focus mainly on which ideas are correct and which are wrong, not on social desirability bias and what the mob is thinking. To approach a conversation from the starting point of thinking about which ideas are “standard” and which are “heterodox” strikes me as the mirror image of “read the room.” The “read the room” crowd is telling you to shut up because what you’re saying is unpopular. But people who always talk about their ideas being oppressed are generally trying to guilt you into taking minority positions. Neither approach is healthy.

— Richard Hanania, “Please Don’t Call Me ‘Heterodox‘”

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Under the spell of that humbug of fame or power, a man is soon prey to other incidental humbugs. There will be no end to it. He soon wants to begin to reform society, to uplift others’ morality, to defend the church, to crush vice, to map programs for others to carry out, to block programs that other people have mapped out, to read before a convention of what other people have done for him under his administration, to sit on committees examining blueprints of an exposition, even to open an insane asylum (what cheek!) — in general, to interfere in other people’s lives.

Yet there is a secondary social humbug, quite as powerful and universal, the humbug of fashion. The courage to be one’s own natural self is quite a rare thing. The Greek philosopher Democritus thought he was doing a great service to mankind by liberating it from the oppression of two great fears: the fear of God and the fear of death. But even that does not liberate us from another equally universal fear: the fear of one’s neighbors. Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man. Consciously or unconsciously, we are all actors in this life playing to the audience in a part and style approved by them.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

What Acts of Cowardice Have Been Committed

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender, non compos mentis No Comments

Ed West:

My optimistic hope is that we will reach some sort of settlement where transgenderism is treated with compassion and, in the relatively small number of cases where people would be genuinely happier living as the opposite sex, tolerated and accepted. I don’t think we will return to a situation where, for example, it’s acceptable for trans people to be abused on the street, or callously mocked. But the excesses of the 2010s and 2020s will prove to be on the wrong side of history — and I think much of what happened will stun people reading about it in decades to come.

Not that it will be remembered, since failed progressive movements tend to disappear in the public memory.

“It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” I don’t think people are overall any crazier now than they’ve ever been at any point in history, but I do think the whole transgender thing will be the characteristic craziness of the past decade. Why did we suddenly decide that biology itself was oppressive and conformity to gender stereotypes was liberating? Who knows. Why did we become enthusiastic for giving children hormones and surgery to help them conform to said stereotypes? For fear of not looking sufficiently progressive. Will today’s cowards learn any chastening lessons from their enthusiasm for such a deranged trend, or will they quietly slink away and hope no one ever decides to scrutinize their old social media? I think you already know the answer to that one.

Oooh, I Wanna Make Up My Mind, But I Don’t Know Myself

By in foolosophy, music, the statusphere No Comments

Liz Pelly:

Meg Lethem was working at her bakery job one morning in Boston when she had an epiphany. Tasked with choosing the day’s soundtrack, she opened Spotify, then flicked and flicked, endlessly searching for something to play. Nothing was perfect for the moment. She looked some more, through playlist after playlist. An uncomfortably familiar loop, it made her realise: she hated how music was being used in her life. “That was the problem,” she says. “Using music, rather than having it be its own experience … What kind of music am I going to use to set a mood for the day? What am I going to use to enjoy my walk? I started not really liking what that meant.”

It wasn’t just passive listening, but a utilitarian approach to music that felt like a creation of the streaming environment. “I decided that having music be this tool to [create] an experience instead of an experience itself was not something I was into,” she reflects. So she cut off her Spotify service, and later, Apple Music too, to focus on making her listening more “home-based” and less of a background experience.

Such reckonings have become increasingly commonplace in recent years, as dedicated music listeners continue to grapple with the unethical economics of streaming companies, and feel the effects of engagement-obsessed, habit-forming business models on their own listening and discovery habits. In the process, they are seeking alternatives.

Ah, yes. Shallow people catch an unwelcome glimpse of self-awareness, immediately decide it must be “the system” that’s to blame.

Wendy Eisenberg, a musician and teacher who recently deleted their account with Napster Music (formerly called Rhapsody), put it this way: “The one thing I’ve noticed since divesting is that music sounds better to me because I’ve put in the work to either locate it on a hard drive or download it from a friend’s Bandcamp or something. And every time I listen to it, even if it’s just on the way to work, I can hear the spiritual irreverence of that choice. And so it doesn’t feel like I am just receiving music from some distant tastemaker. But it seems like I have some relationship to the music, of ritual, which is where I come to it as a practising musician.

“Taking the extra step to load it on to my phone, or the extra step to flip over the tape, or put the CD on in the car, it feels like something that I’m doing, rather than something I’m receiving,” they continue. “And that sense of agency makes me a more dedicated and involved listener than the kind of passive listening-without-listening that streaming was making me do.”

She’s “put in the work,” the spiritually irreverent work, of searching through a file folder or clicking a download button, which is categorically different from compulsively thumbfucking a smartphone. The labor of ejecting a cassette or inserting a CD, the absence of which was the only thing preventing her from, you know, really hearing the music, man. Who says there are no heroes anymore?

I feel like an elderly farmer, watching kids come home from college in the big city for the weekend and rhapsodizing about how authentic and spiritual and mindfulness-inducing it must be for me to work so closely with nature. In reality, streaming music is too common to be special anymore, so the status-obsessed have to find new ways to signal their elevation above the masses. When technological abundance reaches the wrong sort of people, you have to romanticize the inefficient and inconvenient ways we used to do things. Get rid of your dishwasher, turn off all your electronic devices, and have musicians come play chamber music live in your living room if you really want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life.

Like most people who have used a pencil to fix a spaghetti-pile of unwound cassette tape, or who have lugged a small briefcase of compact discs around the car, I appreciate the ease and convenience of streaming. My smartphone is essentially a glorified mp3 player anyway. I have several thousand of my own songs in Apple Music, either bought as digital downloads or uploaded from CDs, organized into playlists. If I don’t feel like listening to any of those, I can just pick a song or a genre and let the algorithm do the work of finding whatever it considers to be related music. I’ve discovered lots of interesting new music this way. How is this “distant tastemaker” any different from the ones who decide which songs get played on the radio station you listen to, or from the ones who choose which bands get featured in the music magazines and websites you read? As always, the relevant question when faced with stupid romantic fantasies is “Compared to what?” The previous status quo wasn’t more authentic; you simply had fewer options. I’m sorry your digital agoraphobia prevents you from appreciating that.

Iron Bonds

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy, juxtapositions No Comments

[Society] is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

— Edmund Burke

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So let me say something a little meatier: you owe it to yourself and the millions of lives that generated yours to live as though you appreciated it.

— Mark Rippetoe, Strong Enough?: Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training

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There may seem to be a bit of superficial irony in juxtaposing these two, but no. Gratitude is an essential part of both conservative philosophy and physical fitness, as I understand them. I’m not only grateful for my own ability to move freely, increase my strength, and optimize my diet, but also for the combined knowledge of countless others which has made it possible for an ordinary individual like myself, living in an ordinary small town, to benefit from it at an affordable price. I’m grateful to be training on a Friday evening and to look around at the others and think, These are my people. They could be out doing anything else to enjoy their weekend, but they’re here, putting in the hard work after hours. There’s a partnership there that transcends the petty egoism which supposedly motivates gym-goers. We owe it to each other.

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