Your Boughs So Green In Summertime

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Charlie Warzel:

But this isn’t about Christmas or Hanukkah or any specific celebration. It’s about finding ways to make it through the winter doldrums.

Right now, that’s more challenging than ever. The holiday comedown was hard enough before COVID stresses, variant surges, and school closures. And while plenty of people out there are embracing normalcy, millions more with lower risk tolerance are hunkering down to protect themselves or loved ones or to keep the hospital system from straining. It is, for many, a lonely time.

“It’s been such a difficult few years for everyone,” Jami Warner, the executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, told me. She said that the Christmas-tree industry has seen a substantial uptick in sales during the pandemic years, even despite supply-chain challenges. Warner also assured me that I was not alone and that people are leaving their artificial trees up longer and longer—sometimes year-round. “We so desperately need that light in our lives these days,” she said. “And people are realizing that having them around is a wonderful, uplifting thing.”

The Lady of the House passed this on as a trollish joke. And given that this is the Atlantic — someone recently (and accurately) described it as the magazine of choice for neurotic progressives in New York and D.C. — I’m happy to treat it in that spirit. But as near as I can tell, the self-pity and therapeutic mawkishness are in earnest. You know what’s worse than all good things coming to an end? Retreating to a fantasy world in order to cope with it. How have so many people made it to quasi-adulthood without learning such a basic lesson? Why are so many people so unembarrassed to present themselves as weak and broken, in constant need of comforting reassurance?

Unstated and Unexamined

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Regardless, that is usually the first order of business in Socratic questioning: find the unconscious judgment that is the “root and nerve” of whatever claim is set forth. You want to get to the bottom of what the argument is really about. Socrates doesn’t usually enter a debate on the terms where it is being fought. He moves it to the level of principle, then goes to work there.

The point can be restated more formally. A classic deductive argument contains a major premise and a minor one. The stock example of a major premise, first used in these words by Mill, is All men are mortal. The stock example of a minor premise is Socrates is a man.  Those two premises, taken together, lead to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal. The major premise is a general principle. The minor premise is a statement about a particular case. Why is this useful to understand? Because the general principle at stake in an argument often goes unstated and unexamined—the “inarticulate major premise,” as it’s sometimes called. The first thing Socrates does is smoke it out.

—Ward Farnsworth,  The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook

I loved that about the Socratic dialogues when I encountered them in Philosophy 101. Geometry, on the other hand, was a subject I loathed when I took it a few years earlier. Still, credit where due: it always stuck with me that when constructing a proof, it doesn’t matter how intricate the individual steps of your proof are if your given is faulty. So much futile effort could be saved if we thought about our given, or our major premise, more closely.

Speaking of philosophy, a subject I still adore in a general-interest way, I’ve been making my way through two of Peter Adamson’s books recently. Adamson writes clearly and entertainingly, but when dealing with a subject like medieval philosophy, say, there’s only so much that can be done to make the ideas and reasoning seem coherent, let alone relevant. I admit that I sometimes feel my eyes crossing and my mind wandering while trying to follow the circuitous logical trails. Take, for example, just one passage I read the other day:

And make no mistake, God does have a choice about what He creates. Scotus’ idea of simultaneously open possibilities is meant to apply to God’s freedom as much as to ours. This is despite the fact that God is a necessary being. Scotus, being Scotus, in fact has a clever and complicated proof of God’s necessary existence. I’ll avoid the complicated bits and cut straight to the most brilliant part. After a lot of work, Scotus is able to demonstrate to his own satisfaction that there could possibly be a cause for all other things, which is first and therefore uncaused. In other words, God might exist. From this Scotus thinks he can immediately infer that God does exist. For just consider: obviously a first cause does not come to exist by being caused to exist by something else. So the only way for such a cause to exist is by being necessarily actual. But we know that there is a way for the cause to exist, since we established that it might exist. Therefore, the cause is necessarily actual, so God does in fact exist. As Scotus notes himself, his proof is reminiscent of earlier attempts to demonstrate the existence of God. The move from God’s possible existence to His actual existence may remind us of the move at the center of Anselm’s ontological argument. Scotus’ proof also recalls Avicenna, and his idea of God as a necessarily existing first cause.

Like I said, it may be intricate, and it may be clever, and it may follow logical rules, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this, and so many similar examples, are just instances of what we now call motivated reasoning. “I want this to be true, so let me assume that it’s true and then develop a post-hoc justification for it.” Well, I don’t wish to be rude, but I think I see your problem.

How many there are who still conclude: “life could not be endured if there were no God!” (Or, as it is put among the idealists: “life could not be endured if its foundation lacked an ethical significance!”) — therefore there must be a God (or existence must have an ethical significance)! The truth, however, is merely that he who is accustomed to these notions does not desire a life without them: that these notions may therefore be necessary to him and for his preservation — but what presumption it is to decree that whatever is necessary for my preservation must actually exist! As if my preservation were something necessary! How if others felt in the opposite way! If those two articles of faith were precisely the conditions under which they no longer found life worth living! And that is how things are now!

A Final Story About Stories

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The Mind of BlackOxford:

Gottschall thinks we can escape what he calls the magic of stories by knowing that they’re stories. Such an escape however would require some sort of final story about stories, an ultimate story like say that of the Catholic Church in its doctrinal statements, or the Fundamentalist’s Bible or the much sought after Theory of Everything in Physics. But these ultimate stories are just more of the same, that is, hopeless attempts to evade the hideous necessity of language through yet more language. Nevertheless Gottschall wants us to have hope, to think that he and we can discern better from worse stories. According to him, the solution is at hand, “We need more reason in the world.”

Where is such reason to be found? Gottschall thinks he knows: “Above all, we need to double down on our commitment to science because science is for standing up to stories.” Has he never heard of epistemology, that centuries-old failed attempt to identify better and worse scientific stories? In other words, his buck-passing solution to what he calls “a pandemic of conspiratorial thinking” has no credibility whatsoever. There is no vaccine (or anti-venom) that can cure us. His book is just another catalogue of useless, largely pornographic, anecdotes about QAnon, Trump, Hitler, Stalin and the various other nutcases who have committed atrocities.

I take the publication of this book as helpful in only one respect – evidence that the the quality editorial staff at Basic Books has deteriorated markedly over recent years.

Oof, that’s a shame. I read Gottschall’s book The Storytelling Animal several years ago and found it interesting, or so I thought. I don’t have it anymore, so evidently, it wasn’t quite interesting enough for me to keep.

(BlackOxford Mind is a collection of the author’s Goodreads reviews, published concomitantly in blog form. Frequently updated and consistently fun to read. You should give it a look-see.)

Views Differ

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It’s in this cheerful mood that I read a new book by an old friend, Johann Hari. It’s called Stolen Focus. Like his previous books — Chasing the Scream, his history of the century-long war on drugs, and Lost Connections, on the social aspect of depression — his new book diagnoses most of us as sane and the culture we live in as mad.

The core thesis is this: Create a throw-away consumerist civilization, break families into ever smaller units, add a tech revolution, online addiction, economic precariousness, breakneck social change, endless work, and the collapse of religion and meaning, and yes, people will go a bit nuts. They’ll become depressed; they’ll seek out escapes through opiates or meth; they’ll disappear down rabbit holes of online fanaticism; they’ll seek meaning through work or fame; they’ll tear each other down with glee; they’ll lose the skills for family, friendship, constancy, discipline and love.

Now intensify the isolation with lockdowns. Segregate more thoroughly. Cover faces with masks. Force people to live even more persistently in a virtual world that makes us less connected in a deep way, but more enmeshed in the pathologies of anonymous mobs.

…Hari wants to ban “surveillance capitalism” — making it illegal for social media companies to favor addictive, maddening viral content; he wants a four-day week; he wants to liberate children from over-parenting. He urges us to turn off notifications; leave Twitter; say no to Tinder and Grindr; re-learn the art of reading books or mastering a craft or skill over time; to take walks phone-free so our minds can wander and make connections and remember things that matter. You remember that, don’t you? We used to call it living.

—Andrew Sullivan

****

But that’s all anecdotal: does Hari actually present any evidence that shortening attention spans is a society-wide problem? There’s a study on how topics appear and disappear on Twitter more quickly now than a few years ago; some research on how many distractions office workers experience; and a dodgy-sounding but headline-ready statistic about how often we “touch our smartphones” each day (2,617 times, apparently).

It’s not until more than halfway through the book, page 176, that Hari drops what should be a bombshell: “We don’t have any long-term studies tracking changes in people’s ability to focus over time.” In other words, he quietly admits that there isn’t really any strong scientific evidence for the main thesis of the book.

…Indeed, many of the other causes Hari identifies are rehashings of previous pop-science and pop-psychology books: we aren’t sleeping enough (Why We Sleep); kids don’t play outdoors any more (Free Range Kids and The Coddling of the American Mind); we don’t eat the right foods (a million diet books). Of course, it’s not a crime to write a book that doesn’t provide any new information. But Hari’s irritating, breathless style turns every single fact he “discovers” into a startling revelation, every single expert he speaks to into the absolute best in the world. Hari’s research — a series of interviews for a pop-psychology book — becomes an intense, globetrotting journey of personal discovery. His mind is so often blown that it’s little wonder it has such difficulty in paying attention.

…The book builds up to Hari’s ultimate theory for why we have all these attentional problems: it’s capitalism itself! Our blinkered focus on economic growth, Hari writes, puts us in a rat-race that ruins the workings of our brains. We should abandon the idea of growth, he argues, and aim for what the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel calls a “steady-state economy”.

— Stuart Ritchie

Jump In the Fire

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Ed West:

More likely, the people with quite wacky beliefs really do believe them, just as Peter Bartholomew genuinely came to think he could walk through the fire; he wasn’t just doing it to own the Normans, or because of audience capture.

Political debate is a status game, certainly, while hypocrisy is also universal, especially among journalists, but the chances are your opponents really do believe what they claim, and this applies even to areas that seem to defy logic. Just as the crusaders, and countless others involved in wars of religion, genuinely did believe they were carrying out God’s will, rather than, as so many historians would have it, it was all about power or some materialist explanation.

We should take people’s beliefs seriously – yet those beliefs are often arbitrary. No doubt many Norman crusaders had a good old laugh at Peter Bartholomew dying of his burns, and the southern idiots who believed him, but had the humble mystic hailed from closer to Caen than Cannes they most likely would have believed him, too.

Whenever some political figure says something provocative or controversial, it’s common to hear others scoff at the idea that they actually meant it. Of course they don’t actually believe that garbage; they’re only saying it to get attention, or because their paycheck depends on it. That’s always a possibility, but the ubiquity of this knee-jerk cynicism indicates that this is just a subtle form of self-congratulation — I see past the subterfuge and camouflage to the hidden truth; you’re a naive mark who probably yells in earnest at the oblivious referee in professional wrestling. It’s also comforting to pretend that money, sex, and power are the only reasons anyone does anything. The world is therefore ultimately rational; nothing ever happens that can’t be explained. I’ve never agreed with this type of thinking, but as I get older, it only seems more evident to me that human psychology is capable of containing all manner of weirdness and willfulness, which is both fascinating and terrifying.

Noteworthies (50)

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Adam Kirsch:

The question that really interests Mann is how an intellectual can justify not being a progressive—something that could not be more relevant in our age of wokeness.

Reflections has sentences that could be applied to current cultural debates without changing a word. Mann complains about the self-righteousness of the liberal, which is “directed morally toward the outside, it is aggressive, for he himself is right, he himself is unassailable, the man of progress and of moral security; only the others need criticism.” He attacks the cultural elitist who “completely perceives the life of his own people, the human reality as it surrounds him, as basically hateful and common.” He deplores the politicization of literature, the idea that a good writer “incessantly pursues humanitarian-democratic progress, insinuates the concept of democracy into every work” and that “art . . . must be the tool of progress.”

Such statements could be cosigned by many of the conservatives and onetime liberals who find themselves on the wrong side of today’s political orthodoxies. The issues at stake are, of course, very different—the progressives of 1914 wanted peace and universal suffrage, while the watchwords of 2021 are “equity and inclusion,” defined in terms of race and gender. And American conservatives who oppose woke orthodoxies have little in common with Mann’s brand of European nationalism. Still, one can recognize in Reflections the familiar frustration of a conservative who finds his core beliefs ruled out-of-bounds by the intellectual powers that be.

…For the Mann of Reflections, the problem isn’t which political side you support; it’s the necessity of choosing a side in the first place. He passionately defends the right to be nonpolitical, arguing that this is the proper stance for the artist and, more broadly, for the German people, whose genius lies in the realm of culture and spirit, not politics. “The German will never mean society when he says ‘life,’ never elevate social problems above moral ones, above inner experience,” he insists.

I’ve never read any of Thomas Mann, but Kirsch has long been one of my favorite critics, so I’m pretty much interested in anything he writes about.

Electric Blue, Blue, Blue Christmas

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Meghan O’Gieblyn:

Repetition is a component of all ascetic traditions, and I like to think that my own habits constitute something like a spiritual discipline. My nature bends toward listlessness and disorder. Resolving to do the same thing each day, at the same time, has given my life a center, insulating me from the siren song of novelty and distraction that has caused me so much unhappiness in the past. I live a monotonous life, which is not to say a tedious one. (I believe, with Rilke, that those who find life dull are not poet enough to call forth its riches.) And I imagine that these tightly circumscribed days are radiating, with each turn of the circle, into widening arcs, amounting to a life whose ties are deeper, whose direction is more certain.

For several years, we’ve had a Christmas Eve ritual of going to Boar’s Head Resort in the evening for a contemplative stroll. It’s a combination of a wealthy neighborhood, an office park, and a small hotel, among other things, owned by the university. The hotel and many of the adjacent buildings had a Tudor design that I’ve always loved, and the decorations at Christmas were always delightful. The restaurant and hotel were always open on Christmas Eve, and occasionally a church group would rent one of the meeting rooms for a holiday party, but mostly, it was easy to stroll around in the dark without seeing anyone else, beyond the occasional member of the cleaning staff, or a late delivery driver finishing their work for the day. There’s something especially poignant about memories that are specific to one day per year. Every time I run my hand along the thick oak beam that serves as a handrail on the footbridge, or wander around the big office complex listening to the gravel crunch underfoot, or sit on one of the swinging benches overlooking the lake, or peek in the entryway to the building with all the nutcrackers and elves surrounding the fireplace, I’m struck all at once by a strange but pleasant sense of temporal disconnect. It’s been a year already, but it feels like an instant. The memory is so vivid, it’s as if I never left.

This year, the Lady of the House drew my attention to an ominous sight on their webpage: an official event called the Winter Wander. I was leery, but I don’t give up my rituals without a fight. Maybe it would be possible to still partake of a free, and free-range, walk around without having to participate in a garish group event, at twenty bucks a head, promising grotesqueries such as “multiple Instagram-worthy moments.” Well, the pictures don’t do it justice: it’s even worse in person than it looks online. Crowds of people in what used to be an empty parking lot. Warm white lights replaced by gaudy blue/green/purple atrocities that would have been more appropriate for a Haunted Hayride-style attraction. A food truck. And “best” of all, a light sculpture in the shape of a giant boar. We drove through, past the directions of the parking lot attendant, muttering oaths of disbelief, before turning around and heading home.

Planet of the Apes Gif

I understand that the plague has forced businesses which depend on travel and tourism to prostitute themselves for funds, but this…this was “we had to destroy Christmas Village in order to save it.” The Director of Special Events says this was the inaugural year for this event, which obviously carries the implied threat of future assaults. My secret, sacred retreat has become a monstrous megachurch. I suppose I’m condemned to exile now, wandering the earth, or at least the neighborhoods within a thirty-minute drive or so, in search of a new Christmas Eve ritual, where the lights are subdued, the decorations are tasteful, the footpaths are deserted, and the architecture is Tudor-style.

Obiter Scripta, no.118

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After years of patient work around the globe, volcanologists and climate modelers are now sure: in the years 536 and 539/40, there occurred at least two volcanic eruptions of almost unprecedented magnitude. The first of them may have been somewhere in the tropics, although the location has not yet been pinned down conclusively. The second was at Lake Ilopango in El Salvador, an explosion so vast that the entire volcano collapsed and left only the flooded caldera that can be seen today, large enough to contain the capital city. It is estimated that Ilopango alone produced up to eighty-seven cubic kilometers of ejecta, a figure big enough to induce double-takes in even the most skeptical authorities.The sulphate emissions may have measured up to two hundred megatonnes, significantly higher than those from Tambora (1815), which was the second-greatest eruption in history. The Ilopango eruption was among the ten largest on earth in the last seven thousand years, and remember, this was preceded by the 536 volcano, so far unlocated. New research suggests these may have been followed by a third major eruption, in 547.

— Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

Price goes on to describe the resulting effects upon the people who would become known to history as the Vikings. Global temperatures fell anywhere from two to four degrees Celsius. The catastrophic effects upon Scandinavian agriculture caused up to a fifty percent population loss, and the consequent collapse of social institutions. Various Norse myths can be plausibly read as referring to those terrible times when the sun disappeared for years. I was talking with a geologist friend the other day, and we idly wondered how much of human culture and self-conception has been shaped by natural disasters, from whichever Middle Eastern flood inspired the myth of Noah’s Ark, to Pompeii, to the Lisbon earthquake. If the Big One hit the West Coast tomorrow and sent California to the bottom of the Pacific, how much would that reshape the American identity? If another Ilopango erupted next week, how would the narrative around climate change be altered? It’s kind of funny to think about how much human pride depends upon the benign neglect of volcanoes, earthquakes, and asteroids.

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