Sorry for the meager output over the past few days. The muse has been silent. Back soon.
Here are a few items that have piled up:
— An outstanding reactionary essay by Richard Weaver. (Worth a post of its own, when time permits.)
— “Spengler” on GÁ¶del and God.
— The estimable Deogolwulf on the atomization of the modern man.
— Courtesy of hbd_chick, a roundup of reactions to Nicholas Wade’s new book on genes and race.
— Science predicts fashion. (Got the 80’s about right, anyway.)
A few days ago we linked to a defiant essay by a young, Jewish college student in which, having been told once too often to ‘check his privilege’, he examined the ‘privileges’ his family had enjoyed in the Holocaust, and during the struggle of its surviving members to build a life in postwar America.
Here’s some of what the author, Tal Fortgang, had to say:
I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.
Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.
Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.
Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will””to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?’ Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.
Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most””his wife and kids””to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential. Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?
Our reader ‘Musey’ commented:
Check your privilege. That means you, not your parents or grandparents. It means now as you live with advantages that others don’t have and have no chance of enjoying. All it means is that we should give some thought to those whose lives are different to ours, and try to put ourselves in their shoes. If that had happened in the 1930”²s maybe the holocaust would never have happened.
This gave me pause. Is that all that “check your privilege” is supposed to mean? A plea for empathy and thanksgiving, and perhaps a little kindness?
Well, maybe. Given the tone and context in which I seem to hear it most of the time, though, I don’t think it’s quite as benign as that, and I don’t think ‘privilege’ means what it used to.
Words are tools for dissecting the world, and for that they work best when they have precise, sharp edges. On the battlefield, though, they’re often more effective when blunted into clubs. (See also ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’.) This now seems to be happening to ‘privilege’; its new meaning seems only to be ‘whatever you have that I covet’.
In particular we seem to be effacing the distinction between ‘privileges’ and ‘rights’. In my own understanding, ‘rights’ are intrinsic and inherent, while ‘privileges’ are contingent and external. We are born with rights, but privileges, one way or another, must be earned; they must be paid for, and we acquire them in virtue of some quality that we bear or possess not merely as members of our species, but as individual persons. (I’ve written before about the importance of this distinction.)
Daniel Dennett once wrote, in a different context, that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything.” It applies here as well, and gives us the key to understanding the meaning of “check your privilege” — which is that we are to be reduced to atoms.
Just as atoms are identical, so are we to be: in the pursuit of absolute equality, each of us is to be made so small that every distinguishing characteristic, every sin and virtue, becomes external to us. Thus reduced, with every individual quality stripped away, there can no longer be any basis for discriminations of any kind at all, and certainly not for any sort of privilege.
It doesn’t stop there: in order to achieve full equality in the here and now, the atomization of the individual must also reduce and externalize our extension in time. Our personal histories, and the heritage of our parents and ancestors, must be scraped away as well. Have you toiled for years to educate yourself, or to create a successful business, and as a result, now enjoy a measure of wealth and comfort that others do not? No, this is unjust; “you didn’t build that”. Correctly understood, you are just a lucky atom, intrinsically no different from any other, wafted to your position of privilege by warm and entirely contingent updrafts.
The point of all this shrinkage is this: if we are all atoms, and atoms are all the same, then there is no just basis for the unequal distribution of blessings in the world. But blessings there are (for now, at least), and something must be done with them — so if there is no basis for distributing them according to privilege, then a mathematically equal distribution becomes, by default, our right.
This, then, is the real meaning of “check your privilege”: if there’s still anything left of you, you haven’t made yourself small enough.
Our pal Mangan directed us yesterday to an interesting item, from Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs, on the idea of ‘political correctness’ as an expression, not of one’s actual beliefs, but as a ‘signaling’ mechanism employed to enhance status. (This is not a new idea, but this is a good treatment of it.)
Inside the article is a link (linked text: ‘Easterlin paradox’) to a previous IEA article that you should make a point of reading. The sublinked item, from 2012, has the title Government shouldn’t worry about our happiness ”“ new research shows.
That item, in turn, contains a link to a detailed IEA report on the subject, which you can download free of charge.
Key points:
— The government should not be trying to measure or maximise happiness as an explicit policy goal.
— There is no evidence that more equal societies lead to increases in happiness.
— Smaller government tends to make people happier.
— Contrary to widespread belief, the evidence suggests that happiness is in fact related to income and economic growth.
Sounds about right to me, of course, with one caveat: that last point could be taken in support of the idea that economic criteria trump all others, as the unholy alliance of open-borders advocates on both sides of the aisle keep telling us. There are, however, other factors that are also of critical importance for happiness, and community life and social cohesion are near the top of the list.
A sharp excerpt from a post by Bryce Laliberte:
Equality is alien to nature… Democracy is opposed to order, for it is fundamentally a kind of disorder; order entails the accumulation of capital, material and social, which likewise entails a hierarchy and the attendant high asymmetries of power. Democracy precludes the accumulation of power by a self-interested estate, at least technically, and so the high degrees of power asymmetry necessary to stability cannot actualize.
Democracy is not “politically neutral,’ as though it only functions as a market which distributes according to preferences and economic power. Democracy politically favors he who would upset hierarchies, for by necessity there are more at the bottom than at the top. All forms of subordination become equivalent to oppression, as those who are subordinate are led to believe that they can rise up and “take what is theirs’ without this proving to destabilize and threaten the whole of society.
Hence you can have a Leftist singularity, for which the result is utter destruction. After all, there is nothing more equal than death.
Very good, but I must quibble: there will always be power asymmetries, even in the rubble of a Left singularity, for the very reason that Mr. Laliberte points out: equality is alien to nature. This means that it can only be maintained by external imposition. And as long as anyone is left alive, that requires power.
It appears as if reality may slowly be impinging upon the consciousness of David Brooks. In today’s column, he laments that the abstract world order he had hoped for seems to be slipping away, yielding to older and more organic forces.
We read:
“The ”˜category error’ of our experts is to tell us that our system is doing just fine and proceeding on its eternal course toward ever-greater progress and global goodness. This is whistling past the graveyard.
“The lesson-category within grand strategic history is that when an established international system enters its phase of deterioration, many leaders nonetheless respond with insouciance, obliviousness, and self-congratulation.
…The weakness with any democratic foreign policy is the problem of motivation. How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending the liberal system?
It was barely possible when we were facing an obviously menacing foe like the Soviet Union. But it’s harder when the system is being gouged by a hundred sub-threshold threats. The Republicans seem to have given up global agreements that form the fabric of that system, while Democrats are slashing the defense budget that undergirds it.
Moreover, people will die for Mother Russia or Allah. But it is harder to get people to die for a set of pluralistic procedures to protect faraway places. It’s been pulling teeth to get people to accept commercial pain and impose sanctions.
All true. (And the weakness of democracy that Mr. Brooks notes above applies equally to domestic policy as well.) But you knew that already, readers.
Most significant of all is this:
The liberal pluralistic system is not a spontaneous natural thing.
Exactly right. This is why it can only be imposed externally, by an increasingly malevolent concentration of power, rather than arising organically at all levels of a harmonious and self-organizing hierarchy. This is why it is the natural enemy of genuine and meaningful liberty. And this is why we must resist it.
Just in case, loyal Readers, you happen to be looking for a fat tax write-off; and supposing also that you’ve been troubled lately by how hard it is for aging, pallid reactionary male bloggers just to get around without being interfered with by resentful Progressive mobs, here’s the perfect way to kill two birds with one stone: by getting me one of these.
NRO’s Jim Geraghty attended the National Rifle Association’s annual convention last week in Indianapolis, and today he summed up his impressions in an excellent post.
I had begun to cull some excerpts, but really you should go read the whole thing yourself. It’s here.
Best line:
“Hi, I’m here to change your culture!’
After yesterday’s depressing post, here’s some good news from across the pond: the anti-EU party UKIP has surged to first place in the runup to to next month’s elections.
Suddenly, all over Europe, the spell is breaking.
Once, Winston Churchill was the voice of England, the defender of “the island race“. My parents, who grew up in Britain, remembered hearing him on the radio during the Blitz. They told me that, more than anything else, it was his lion’s heart (and his lion’s roar) that gave the sturdy people of that battered and isolated kingdom the strength, in their darkest hour, to go on alone against overwhelming odds.
Churchill was also one of the greatest masters of the English language ever to lift a pen, and devoted his long literary life to the story of his ancient homeland and people. His crowning achievement, his incomparable six-volume history of the Second World War, rightly earned him the Nobel Prize.
When Churchill died in 1965 at the age of 91, the English-speaking world wept. At the time of his death he was considered by many, if not nearly all, of the British people to be the greatest Englishman who ever lived.
Quoting Winston Churchill in public can now get you arrested. Story here.
This morning I dropped a post I had written late last night, something I rarely do. When I got up and reread it, it just seemed too morose. As news unfolded later in the morning, I was glad I had done it for another reason: it would have led to more bickering than I have the time or patience for today.
Hello, … well, something very different indeed.
Here’s an article about what college “debate” has become.
In his latest column, Patrick Buchanan argues that what confounded the Soviet empire, and what will keep Vladimir Putin’s revanchist ambitions in check today, is not sanctions or military threats, but a rising tide of nationalism.
We read:
Before we start sending troops back to Europe, as we did 65 years ago under Harry Truman, let us ask ourselves: Was it really the U.S. Army, which never crossed the Elbe or engaged in battle with the Red Army, that brought down the Soviet Empire and dissolved the Soviet Union?
No. What liberated the nations of Eastern Europe and the USSR was the determined will of these peoples to be free to decide their own destinies and create, or re-create, nations based on their own history, language, culture and ethnic identity?
Nationalism brought down the empire. And Mikhail Gorbachev let these nations go because Russia was weary of maintaining a coercive empire and because Russia, too, wanted to be part of the free world.
While Putin may want the Russians of Ukraine and Belarus back inside a Greater Russia, does anyone think he wants Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs or Slovaks back under Moscow’s rule?
Putin knows that his own popularity, near 80 percent, is due directly to his being seen as a nationalist willing to stand up to the Americans and their claim to be sole architects of the New World Order.
And it is nationalism, not a NATO full of freeloaders, that is America’s great ally in this post-Cold War world.
It was nationalism that liberated the captive nations, broke apart the Soviet Union, split Czechoslovakia in two and divided Yugoslavia into seven countries.
Nationalism drove the Chechens to try to break from Moscow, the Abkhazians and South Ossetians to secede from Georgia, and the Crimeans to say good-bye to Kiev.
And as nationalism tore apart the Soviet Empire and USSR, nationalism will prevent their recreation.
Read the whole thing here.
In a splenetic comment to an earlier post, a reader presents us with a clinical example of what I have called Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus: an AIDS-like memetic infection that attacks the social organism’s immune system, rendering it incapable of making essential discriminations — in particular, exactly those self/other distinctions that any organism must make to defend itself against external threats and invasive pathogens.
We read:
When Brandeis University looked into Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s phony claims of fleeing Somalia to gain asylum, her vile remarks about Muslims, and her support of mass murderer Anders Brievik, they decided that they did not want to provide their imprimatur for her. The right wing protested loudly, as they suddenly became staunch defenders of freedom of speech. However, if Ali has the free speech rights to vilify Muslims, then Louis Farrakhan has the same right to vilify whites, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the same right to vilify Jews. Would those who loudly defend Ali make the same vociferous defense of a university withdrew an award to Farrakhan or Ahmadinejad? Wake me up when that happens…
If a writer wants to defame Islam, then she has the freedom to do so and have her writings celebrated by a large university, because when Muslims are concerned, anything is fair game.
In autoimmune diseases, the body’s threat-detection mechanism malfunctions, losing the ability to distinguish between invasive pathogens and its own tissue — between self and other — and the body begins to attack itself. In the most lethal forms of autoimmune diseases, the immune system itself becomes the target of the immune response. This is far more dangerous: it completely neutralizes the body’s defenses, and the victim quickly dies of opportunistic infections. This is what the human immunodeficency virus does, and before treatments were discovered to suppress its disease mechanism, AIDS was a death sentence. The cultural equivalent of HIV is what we see here.
Formerly infected by a virulent and exquisitely evolved memetic agent, a woman has managed to cure herself of it. Knowing that this bug is aggressively opportunistic, highly contagious, mutates quickly, is almost completely resistant to all antibiotics, and is epidemic throughout much of the world, she makes her way to the West, which is already immunosuppressed to the point that an accelerating infection by this restless pathogen has caused significant necrosis in large areas of formerly healthy tissue.
Seeing that her adopted culture’s immune response is faltering, she attempts to activate it. She does so by distributing a film. So far has the opportunistic infection already progressed, however, that her collaborator is murdered in the street by a carrier of the same memetic pathogen.
Meanwhile, the immune system of her Western host is weakening rapidly under the progressively debilitating effect of the second, and ultimately more lethal pathogen — C.I.V. (If I may coin another expression, I’ll say that this disease is ‘ideo-pathic”.) By attempting to trigger a defensive reaction, she attracts the attention of this hijacked system, and it does indeed begin to mount a response: it attacks her.
And this is what you see here. “Support” for Anders Breivik? Nonsense. “Vilify Muslims”? No, her criticism is of the mind-virus that has infected them. “Where Muslims are concerned, anything is fair game?” Nonsense upon stilts, that one: a startling, total inversion of reality in a self-abnegating Western culture that relentlessly derogates its own history and traditions, but that cannot even bring itself to name its ancient and implacable enemy, let alone to speak frankly about it — and certainly not to resist it.
Here’s a fine online edition of Philogelos, the world’s oldest joke book.
Megan McArdle comments on the Obama administration’s conveniently timed revamp of insurance-data collection:
I’m speechless. Shocked. Stunned. Horrified. Befuddled. Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered and dumbfounded. It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report is supposed to be “people who lacked insurance for the entire previous year,’ but people tend to answer with their insurance status right now.
But why, dear God, oh, why, would you change it in the one year in the entire history of the republic that it is most important for policy makers, researchers and voters to be able to compare the number of uninsured to those in prior years? The answers would seem to range from “total incompetence on the part of every level of this administration’ to something worse.
I’ll go with “something worse”.
Here’s a calm and reasonable article about “climate change”. The author is Lennart Bengtsson, an impeccably credentialed climate researcher.
We read:
More CO2 in the atmosphere leads undoubtedly to a warming of the earth surface. However, the extent and speed of this warming are still uncertain, because we cannot yet separate well enough the greenhouse effect from other climate influences. Although the radiative forcing by greenhouse gases (including methane, nitrogen oxides and fluorocarbons) has increased by 2.5 watts per square meter since the mid-19th century, observations show only a moderate warming of 0.8 degrees Celsius. Thus, the warming is significantly smaller than predicted by most climate models. In addition, the warming in the last century was not uniform. Phases of manifest warming were followed by periods with no warming at all or even cooling.
The complex and only partially understood relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming leads to a political dilemma. We do not know when to expect a warming of 2 degrees Celsius. The IPCC assumes that the earth will warm up by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celcius in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration. These high values of climate sensitivity, however, are not supported by observations. In other words: global warming has not been a serious problem so far if we rely on observations. It is only a problem when we refer to climate simulations by computer models.
There is no alternative to such computer simulations if one wants to predict future developments. However, since there is no way to validate them, the forecasts are more a matter of faith than a fact. The IPCC has published its expert opinion a few months ago and presented it in the form of probabilities. As long as the results cannot be supported by validated models they produce a false impression of reliability.
EU member states pursue a strategy of reducing the climate risk by reducing the use of fossil fuels in the shortest time to a minimum. Many citizens are risk averse and therefore support this policy. In addition, many citizens want to phase-out nuclear power, because it is also seen as too risky. To eliminate both nuclear energy as well as fossil fuels is an enormous challenge. Nevertheless, Germany and Switzerland have opted for such an energy transition. To pursue such a radical and perhaps risky energy policy, despite the limited economic, scientific and technical capabilities of the two countries is an enormous undertaking.
There are two things that need to be addressed in this context. Firstly, such energy transitions will, unfortunately, do little to reduce global CO2 emissions, since 90 percent of these emissions come from countries outside Europe. Many of these countries are likely to increase their CO2 emissions in the future, as their population increases and their top priority is to improve the living standards of their citizens. China is a special case. Its CO2 emissions have more than doubled in the last decade and are now about 50 percent higher than those of the United States. For various reasons, there are no alternatives to fossil fuels in the developing countries for the time being. Energy demand there is great. Currently, 1.3 billion people have no access to electricity. To reduce their own emissions easily and quickly, the OECD countries have outsourced some of their energy-intensive production to developing countries. In the national statistics, this looks good. Globally, however, not much changes, since the emissions occur simply somewhere else.
Secondly, the rapid transition to renewable energy has led to a considerable increase in energy prices in many countries, especially in Europe. This weakens the competitiveness and leads to a relocation of energy-intensive industries to countries such as the USA, where the energy price has dropped significantly by the use of shale gas.
It is no surprise that there are other forces that are driving rapid change. Because once government subsidies are involved, huge profits are available. However, before radical and hasty changes to the current energy system are implemented, there must be robust evidence that climate change is significantly detrimental. We are still far away from such evidence. It would be wrong to conclude from the report of the IPCC and similar reports that the science is settled.
Just trying to keep it fair and balanced, folks.
Here’s a good piece by Jon Hinderaker on the Bundy affair.
It’s just spring here in Wellfleet, and suddenly there are daffodils everywhere.
I love daffodils; they seem perfect to me. They sing of warm spring sunlight, and cool clear air, and dark fertile soil, and of beauty unvanquished. I’ve always thought that daffodils are pure joy.
I’ve written in these pages, from time to time, about some of the ideas I’ve encountered in my contact with systems of “inner work”. In particular I’ve mentioned the ideas that the Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff brought to the West at the beginning of the last century: a distillation of the esoteric teachings of various Central Asian “schools”.
One of the ideas of this system is that we are ‘three-brained beings’: that within us are three very distinct centers of activity whose operation, in a perfected being, would be harmonized under the executive control of a single, awakened ‘I’ — but which, in our disordered state, just run along ‘willy-nilly’, quite separately and chaotically. These centers correspond, in simple terms, to the intellect, the emotions, and the drives and instincts of the physical body. In our usual state, sometimes one is in charge, sometimes another; sometimes they bicker and disagree. Often they just go about their business quite independently.
Why am I mentioning all of this here? Because I was reminded of something that happened to me, something that gave me some empirical data about all of this.
Many years ago, I was walking in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with my mother-in-law Lily on a fine April day. We were arguing about something. (Lily, for all her talents and fascinating charms, is a stubborn and opinionated woman, and often a quarrelsome one, and of course readers of this blog will know that I have a scrappy streak myself.)
So: there I was, fully engaged in heated debate about some forgotten topic, and thinking about nothing else, when I became aware, quite gradually at first, of a strange feeling in my middle — a kind of warmth, not at all unpleasant. Eventually this spreading warmth became insistent enough for me to give it my full attention, and then I realized what it was.
While I was busy arguing with Lily, we happened to be standing in front of a little grassy rise, and bursting from the green grass were hundreds and hundreds of daffodils, positively singing in the warm April sunshine. (Here’s a picture of that very spot.) While my intellectual part, and my attention, were completely ensnared by Lily and the argument we were having, my emotional center, on this perfect spring day, was having a little dance-party with all those daffodils, without my even knowing it was happening.
My words trailed off as I began to understand what was going on, and after a minute Lily’s did too. We just stood there feeling happy.
I’ve never forgotten that experience. It was as if those daffodils needed to teach me something, then and there, and made sure I learned it. I thank them, every April.
I just took an online survey called “How Stereotypically White Are You?” It offers a hundred criteria, and asks the respondent to check all that apply.
Most of them were things like “Have you ever listened to John Mayer while hooking up with someone?”
(The sort of questions I might have asked — “Have you ever solved a partial differential equation?” or “Have you ever watched a movie in a theater without talking?” or even “Have you ever sat quietly in a room, reading an old book?” weren’t there at all, curiously enough.)
Anyway, I managed to check seventeen items. (I recalled, for example, that I had once watched bowling on television.)
My result page said “Congratulations, you are NOT white!”
I have an ominous feeling about all of this. I fear it will not end well.
We’ve been hacked, it seems. Perhaps it’s that ‘Heartbleed’ business, although my understanding was that Bluehost, my hosting service, had not been affected.
Thanks to Matt Walker for leaving a comment on one of the (now deleted) spam posts to tell us that our RSS feed is corrupted also.
Our in-house team of cyberterrorism experts is investigating. We may need to go offline for a bit.
Brandeis University has rescinded its decision to award Aayan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree at this year’s commencement. You might have thought that a Jewish liberal-arts institution that was sufficiently impressed by Ms. Ali’s advocacy of women’s rights to offer her this honor wouldn’t be put off by her outspoken criticism of a culture that subjected her to grisly genital mutilation (the same culture that also relentlessly seeks the destruction of Israel and the subjugation of the Jews), but all that means is that the dhimmitude of the West has got a little farther along than you were aware of.
In case this comes as a surprise to you, here’s an even more depressing exhibit, from Sweden’s former “Integration Minister”:
“We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.’
As the linked article points out, this one may be “best example of Western Leftist Dhimmitude ever, combining defeatism, inevitability, false hope, and a fatal misunderstanding of Islam all in one sentence.”
So: what does the title of this post mean? It stands for a coinage of my own: Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus, the memetic plague that will be the death of the West.
A story that’s making the rounds today concerns trending changes in the way people read. Here’s the lede, from today’s Washington Post:
Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to.
“I give it a few seconds ”” not even minutes ”” and then I’m moving again,’ says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.
But it’s not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel.
“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,’ she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.’
To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.
I don’t doubt this is true, and I think it’s fair to be alarmed. It isn’t as if the things a person ought to understand about the world have got any simpler than they were in pre-Internet days; it’s just that we are no longer given the time we need to absorb them. In terms of the ideal-gas-law metaphor I proposed in an earlier post, the container we live in has got so small that we collide with everything from everywhere; the temperature and pressure have gone up so dramatically that it’s hard for large, complex mental structures to form before they are battered apart by impinging, energetic particles.
The article in the Post seems a bit muddled, however, on exactly what’s happening to the human brain as a result. We read:
The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision.
This is an extraordinary thing to say, and it must almost certainly be false. Reading is such a powerful tool, and written language so ancient, that hundreds of generations of differential reproduction surely must have favored, by now, brains that have the knack for reading over those that don’t, at least in those populations where the written word is culturally important (and of course the written word will have become culturally important in those populations whose brains are wired more advantageously for reading.)
The muddle continues in the next sentence:
But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read.
The brain “has adapted”? What does this mean, if not that modern brains are innately different from preliterate ones? If not, then “the brain” hasn’t adapted; it’s just the same old brain in every generation, with the only difference being that some people teach their kids to use it to read. But the very idea that there is no genetic difference between brains that can and can’t read is absurd: we can’t teach dogs to read, after all, and the fact that some humans can learn to read at a very early age, while other barely achieve literacy even with intense effort, makes it obvious that there is some innate (i.e. genetic) difference between them. If the difference is innate, then it is almost certainly heritable, and if it confers even a slight edge in reproductive fitness, then over the course of hundreds of generations it would have resulted in significant adaptative change. So “there are no genes for reading” is, I think, obvious nonsense.
Having said all that, I don’t doubt that the brain can be trained to read in different ways — and I imagine that, as with other aspects of language acquisition, the way we learn in childhood has a profound effect on what we will be capable of for the rest of our lives. Failing to learn “long form” reading during this “imprinting” period, and learning instead to cultivate the shallow, transient sort of attention that one needs in a world of constant, brief distractions might very well mean that we never learn to think the long, deep thoughts that are essential to serious intellectual work; the world simply cannot be understood in 140-character crumbs.
There is more to this than mere reading, too: growing up bathed in constant, high-frequency impingement would interfere, I should think, with a child’s ever learning to control his attention at all. From the perspective of every esoteric tradition, every organized system of inner work from the Buddha’s to Gurdjieff’s, this is very worrisome indeed.
My Android phone just had a stroke, and I had to do a factory reset. I lost all my applications, which meant I had to go rummaging around to replace them.
It’s turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I’ve found some nifty new ones, and after blasting away all the cruft that had accumulated over the past four years (yes, I have a four-year-old smartphone) the old beast is running much better.
Among the new apps I’ve just installed are a terrific new chess program called Droidfish, a marvelous little audio recorder called Easy Voice, and an app called SnapPea, which gives you direct access to your phone through your WiFi network. That last one is really great.
Also recommended: a task manager called WatchDog Lite, Google Sky Map, and HDR Camera+.
My favorite, though, is this one. I’ll bet I’m the only person you know who has it.
This time it’s Javascript inventor Brendan Eich, who failed to pull his neck in quickly enough as the Overton Window sped leftward. He was defenestrated today as head of Mozilla, for supporting a rational ideological position that every society on earth — and even Barack Obama himself — defended until just a couple of years ago. (Please forgive this mangled mish-mosh of metaphors.)
Have a heterodox opinion? Better keep it to yourself, if you have anything to lose. Your career is now fair game if you make unapproved comments or political donations.
Recently the Huffington Post took a big swipe at Charles Murray, with all the intellectual rigor we’ve come to expect from the blank-slate universalist Left. The argument appears to be that he’s a racist, sexist old white guy, so everything he says must, a priori, be false, and therefore beneath refutation.
(When an idea is simply forbidden to be true, good people should steer clear of engaging it; tempting us to do so, after all, is how the Devil reaps his harvest of human souls. Just cover your ears, and pray a little louder. And notify the appropriate authorities.)
Murray pushed back (a little) today, here.
— Zoomable panorama of the Milky Way.
— :-(
— Privilege!.
— Biohazard.
— Mate In 10!
— Warning: major time-sink.
Matt Ridley comments on the latest round of climate reports from the UN, here.
I present this simply in the interest of balance, of course. I find it necessary to reiterate our own editorial position on global warming “climate change” from time to time, so here it is:
1) The Earth may indeed be warming; it has warmed and cooled throughout its history, and has often been much warmer, and much colder, than it is today. We are currently in one of the “interglacial” periods of a continuing Ice Age. About a thousand years ago, we underwent a significant warm spell, during which time even Greenland became hospitable; this was of course long before human industrial activity could have had any significant effect on climate. Much longer ago, the Earth was warm enough for there to have been ferns in Antarctica. There has not been any statistically significant warming this century — but this does not mean that we are not in a long-term warming spell.
2) None of this should be understood to imply that present-day human activity cannot be exerting an influence on climate. It does mean that huge, completely natural swings of climate happen all the time, and will continue to do so, until we humans achieve such towering technological puissance that we can actually control the Earth’s climate. Anyone who suggests that we have this power already, however, is a fool or a liar.
3) Warming can have both good and bad effects. We tend to hear a lot more in the press about the bad than the good, but warming brings: increased agricultural yield through longer growing seasons in temperate zones and extension of arable land into higher latitudes; lower energy costs; access to resources currently inaccessible due to permanent ice; and fewer winter deaths (cold weather kills many more people than hot — not only directly, but also through influenza and other diseases, and accidents and other calamities caused by snow and ice). In addition, CO2 is what plants eat, so having more of it in the atmosphere also tends to increase agricultural output.
4) There can be no doubt that a great many people have taken this “crisis” as a foundation upon which to erect prominent careers and lucrative business interests, and have used it as a stalking-horse for the advancement of centralizing ideologies: politicians, bureaucrats, academic grant-recipients, film-makers and propagandists, “green energy” entrepreneurs, small nations eager to get their hands on the collar (and onto the pockets) of the big ones, and so on. Where there is so much to gain, there is good reason for wariness about vested interest, conflicts of interest, and ulterior motives. As I wrote in a post on this subject about four years ago:
My responses in these pages generally reflect an inveterate wariness toward grandiose collectivist schemes, particularly when they assume the form of secular religions, complete with sanctimonious moralizing toward infidels and heretics — all of which the Global Warmist movement exhibits in spades.
Students of history need no reminding that progressivist ideologues like nothing better than a crisis, or an external enemy; they are just the thing for suspending those pesky individual economic and social liberties, and they provide an unbeatable rationale for collective action at the broadest possible scale. In times past the broadest possible scale was that of a nation, or a continent — but Global Warming, affecting, as it is alleged to do, the entire Planet, expands “broadest possible scale” to its literal maximum.
Sometimes crises come ready to hand. For example, Woodrow Wilson made splendid use of the Great War to impose, albeit briefly, a stifling statist regime here in America, in which many cherished freedoms were simply laid aside, and individualism itself became a grave moral transgression. FDR was similarly fortunate: the Great Depression, and then the Second World War, gave him everything he needed. His National Recovery Administration, under the stern leadership of Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson (who actually distributed Mussolini’s writings to his staff) was a Fascist apparatus in all but name — as witness propaganda clips like this, featuring FDR and the Blue Eagle as only a compliant, complicit Hollywood could present them.
In quieter times, when the moment simply must be seized, crises can also be made to order. But whether bespoke or off-the-rack, crises have been essential, again and again, to the subductions and upthrusts of history’s seismic shifts.
To those modern reformers, then, whose eyes glitter with collectivist and redistributionist ambitions of Earth-girdling scope, a truly global emergency was needed. And by a splendid stroke of luck, they have found one.
5) The question before us, then, is what to do about all of this, which is a purely normative question about which reasonable people may disagree. Given everything presented above, though, and speaking just for myself, I must confess a positively heretical lack of enthusiasm for colossal political and economic interventions in response to this “crisis”, or for further abdication of national sovereignty and individual liberties to ambitious U.N. busybodies.
I know, of course, that for my sins I must bear the obloquy of the faithful, but there it is. Here I stand; I can do no other.
Our earlier posts on global warming are collected here.
I’ve written before (see here, here and here) about my mother-in-law, Lily Renée Willheim Phillips, who was born in Vienna, fled the Nazis in the Kindertransport, and made her way first to England and then to New York. Once she got here, she took up a job drawing comic books, working at a company called Fiction House until 1948 or so — the latter part of an era that has become known to aficionados as the “Golden Age“.
Lily is now 92, and still living in New York. She had long ago put her comic-book years behind her; to her it had never been anything more than a way to make a living, and she’d always been a little embarrassed about it. In her mind it was undignified work for a serious artist. Meanwhile, as far as comic-book fans knew, she had simply vanished.
In 2007, my daughter was surprised to see her grandmother mentioned online as a long-lost legend of the Golden Age with a sizable fan base, and so she contacted the author of the article to tell her that the mysterious Lily Renée was in fact alive and well. This was, apparently, a bit of a bombshell in the (by now enormous) world of comic fans, and the next thing you know Lily was onstage at ComicCon, written up in Newsweek, and generally found herself the toast of the town.
Now the woman my daughter originally contacted, Trina Robbins, has put together an online book featuring scans of Lily’s comics. You can download it here.
It’s lousy out: chilly and raining.
It occurred to me earlier, as I was taking note of this, that there are an awful lot of words for this sort of weather, all beginning with ‘d’: damp, dark, dispiriting, dreary, dull, dismal, disagreeable, drenching, dank, drab, doleful, dim, depressing, and probably some others I haven’t thought of.
Writing this down reminds me that there is similar cluster of words dealing with the various qualities of light, all beginning with ‘gl’. But that hardly seems appropriate on a day like today, so we’ll leave it for another time.
Patrick Buchanan’s been on a bit of a roll lately. In his latest, he invites us to look at this Ukrainian ruction from the Russian point of view.
The political statistician Nate Silver recently predicted that the Democrats might lose the Senate this fall (insh’Allah). This has caused some consternation over on the Left.
Mr. Silver also moved his blog, recently, from the New York Times to ESPN. In an item published earlier today, he notes that this seems to have ruffled a feather or two also.
In case you missed it, Venice has just voted to secede from Italy. It’s happening all over Europe: a backlash against centralization, a resurgence of identitarianism, and a yearning for local control. (It’s happening in America, too.)
When I was in Venice and Florence in 2012, it seemed that almost any conversation with the locals quickly devolved into an anti-EU rant, so I’m hardly shocked to see this in the news. We neoreactionary types are all about self-determination and ‘exit’ as important freedoms, and so the good people of Veneto certainly have my blessing. I think a ‘patchwork’ Europe of smaller, more homogenous states will be a happier place, and smaller polities will be able to arrange their affairs in ways that are better suited to their individual customs, folkways, and needs.
Patrick Buchanan, who understands the enduring pull of ethnonationalism better than most, weighs in on all of this, here.
Back in February the New York Times Magazine published an article about the decline of eros in the modern-day marriage. The story noted what should be an entirely unsurprising fact: where there is less differentiation in gender roles, there tends to be less sex.
We read:
A study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” which appeared in The American Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more equal, the sex in these marriages will improve, too. Instead, it found that when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less sex. Specifically, if men did all of what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming — the kinds of things many women say they want their husbands to do — then couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn’t just the frequency that was affected, either — at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.
I said above that this was a “surprising” fact. The truth is, though, that until very recently this would have surprised nobody in the world, and it certainly didn’t surprise me. (It did seem to be a bit of a jolt, though, to the author of the article, which is itself completely, depressingly unsurprising.)
I have a friend named Bob Wyman; he was the founder of a startup company I worked for a few years ago. He’s a mighty smart guy. One of Bob’s pet ideas is that we can understand a great many things about the human and social world through the metaphor of thermodynamics. In particular he likes to say that everything that is good in the world tends to reduce entropy, while everything bad increases it. For example, war is bad. This makes sense, in Bob’s view, because wars take highly ordered systems — the social and physical infrastructures of nations — and reduce them to disordered rubble. Meanwhile, wars also kill people — and a living human body is a far more ordered arrangement of the substance of the world than a decomposing corpse. And so on.
It isn’t hard to apply Bob’s idea here. For any system to be capable of producing useful work, there needs to be disequilibrium, a difference in potential. For a mill-race to turn a water-wheel, the water must flow downhill over the wheel. If the water on one side of the wheel is at the same level as on the other — that is, the parts of the system are at equilibrium — then nothing will happen. When the potential gradient inside a flashlight battery reaches zero, the battery is dead.
And so it is in a marriage: when the two poles of that system are at equilibrium, you can’t expect to produce any electricity.
“Love makes the world go round”, the old saying goes. Well, making the world go round takes work. You’ll search in vain for any civilization, anywhere in history or anywhere on Earth, that didn’t understand that the duality of male and female — the eternal, and yes, sacred disequilibrium of yin and yang, of light and darkness, of sky and earth — is what makes that motor run.
Until now, that is.
— Learn a card trick from Penn and Teller.
— A survey of meteorologists on “climate change”.
— Unintended consequences of Britain’s welfare state.
— Why Intelligent Design retains its broad appeal.
— The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.
— Watch the change in popularity of given names over time.
— Waivers? No way. (From 2012.)
— For you chessplayers: an endgame gem.
— A nifty tool for taxonomists.
— Awwww….
Boy, what a week. Not being a man of independent means, I still must toil for my daily crust, and this week that included a 24-hour-long workday spanning Tuesday and Wednesday (a software crisis in the Antipodes, now resolved).
I used to do a lot of those as a youthful studio rat, but for a man of my advancing years, they take a heavy toll on what M. Poirot used to call the “little grey cells”.
Back with something more substantial when the fog lifts. For tonight, though, all I have for you is this remarkable lass.
Blessed is he who hath a soul,
Blessed is he who hath none,
Woe and sorrow to him who hath it in conception.
– Gurdjieff
Well, it appears from yesterday’s referendum that the people of Crimea would rather be Russian. Vladimir Putin is glad to welcome them back to the Motherland.
The Obama administration, which didn’t want to see the referendum happen at all, imposed some punitive measures on a few Russian big-shots, but nobody over there seems to mind much.
Here’s one reaction, from a Russian television personality:
“Russia is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash,” anchor Dmitry Kiselyov said on his weekly news show on state-controlled Rossiya 1 television.
No need to bother, tovarich. Just leave that to the Democrats.
[rimshot]
Meanwhile, local self-determination is busting out all over. Can’t imagine why.
In other news, it was a big day for astrophysicist Alan Guth, whose brilliant 1979 insight — that in the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the universe expanded, very briefly, at a staggeringly enormous rate — has received dramatic confirmation in recent observations. Learn more here.
Mitch Leigh has died. He’s the one who wrote the music for the 60’s Broadway hit Man of La Mancha, which featured a song I know you know: The Impossible Dream. (For the fullest possible effect, here’s Robert Goulet singing it at a Jerry Lewis telethon!) You can read his New York Times obituary here.
One thing about that obituary: Mitch Leigh started out as a composer of music for advertising. He was very good at it, and anyone my age who grew up in America will remember a lot of his melodies (this one, for instance). In my own eclectic recording career, I worked with many of the best jingle-writers in the biz, and I came to realize that there was generally more creative spark at any of the major New York jingle houses than in the whole Top 40.
So it got my Irish up to see this in Mitch Leigh’s obit:
He never apologized for working in advertising…
“Apologized”? Excuse me?
Oh wait, it’s the New York Times. Right. Never mind.
I knew Mr. Leigh slightly; he had a nice office, with a very serviceable little recording studio, on 57th Street in Manhattan, and sometime back in the mid-90’s I spent a month or so doing synth programming and mixing for a personal project of his, called Changing Times: a Jazz Symphony. (I still have a copy somewhere; I should give it another listen.) Mr. Leigh treated me very well, and paid me handsomely. He was an artist and a gentleman. May his heart lie peaceful and calm.
Finally, that Malaysian airliner’s still missing. Theories abound. Here’s mine: some people wanted a jet, and now they have one. I wonder what they’re going to do with it.
Our e-pal hbd*chick has just put up a fascinating post on the Hajnal Line.
The what?
The Hajnal Line marks a boundary between areas of Europe characterized by different marriage practices. Among hbd*chick’s primary areas of interest is the effect these differences have had on both culture and genome in historical time.
Hie thee thither and learn more.
Over at VDare, John Derbyshire reviews A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, a forthcoming book by chief New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade.
The book is important — a watershed, really. For the first time (that I’m aware of, at least), a major writer with impeccable Cathedral credentials brings squarely into mainstream discourse the full-blown scientific reality of human biodiversity (though apparently not without a cautious, and understandable, dispersion of what Mr. Derbyshire refers to as “squid ink”). Others have paved the way: E.O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology established a beachhead (at a personal and professional cost to Wilson that must have evoked the landings at Normandy), and Steven Pinker’s 2003 The Blank Slate secured some strategically important territory, but Wade’s book appears to be a push for the capital. It will be out on May 6th.
Read Derb’s review here.
A while back I agreed to comment on a New York Times editorial advocating a rise in the minimum wage. (The editorial, entitled The Clear Benefits of a Higher Wage, is here.)
The brief editorial’s main point is that a minimum-wage increase cannot be reliably expected to cause enough of an increase in unemployment to offset its benefits. In this earlier post, I took a look at the effect of historical minimum-wage rates on unemployment, and in my (admittedly cursory) survey of the data, was indeed unable to see any persuasive correlation. That said, however, this surely must depend on how high the minimum wage is set; if it were to be raised to $100 an hour, obviously a great many employers would go out of business, and a great many jobs would be lost. It may well be the case, though, that a minimum-wage rise of the amount currently proposed — to $10.10 an hour from $7.50 — might strike a tolerable balance in terms of jobs lost vs. more money for those not fired. As the minimum wage rises, however, and technology gets better and cheaper, the threshold at which automation becomes more attractive than human employees will naturally become lower — especially given the ever-increasing incidental cost and bureaucratic burden of hiring human workers. It will be more and more likely that this is what a ten-dollar-an-hour fast-food employee looks like.
A common criticism of minimum-wage increases as a means to assist poor families is that many of the people who earn minimum wage are not adults supporting such families, but teenagers or other members of families that are well above the poverty line (or both). The Times asserts that 90% of minimum-wage workers are over 20 years old, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is simply false: the BLS puts the number under 20 at 30.9%, and the number under 25 at 55%. Meanwhile, according to the Congressional Budget Office, only 19% of minimum-wage earners have family incomes below the poverty level. The Times, understandably, doesn’t even comment on this.
We should note also that a great many of the nation’s poor are chronically unemployed; a policy that seeks to ameliorate poverty by raising the minimum wage obviously won’t help these people at all. Indeed, if anything it will hinder them, because it will make entry-level work that much harder to get.
Another consideration is that most minimum-wage jobs are entry-level, temporary positions. Most people earning the minimum wage — the estimates I’ve found are generally around two-thirds — are earning more a year later. But while individuals with minimum-wage jobs tend to move fairly quickly off the bottom rung, minimum-wage increases impose a permanent increase to employers in the cost of staffing these positions.
This brings us to the conservative’s principal objection to minimum-wage policy as a means of addressing poverty: it takes a public problem — the existence of the poor — and uses the compulsory power of law to foist it off onto an arbitrarily selected subset of the private sector. It’s a way for politicians to offer magnanimous sound-bites — “Give America a raise!” — while doing little except bossing private citizens around, interfering with the natural equilibria of labor markets, and placing yet another burden on employers, a burden that, as with all government regulation, falls hardest on small businesses.
Conservatives find this sort of thinking, always in evidence on the Left, particularly offensive. Winston Churchill once summed it up this way:
Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.
It isn’t, after all, as if the public sector doesn’t have other effective solutions available; as the Washington Post argues here, addressing the problem through the Earned Income Tax Credit is both more effective at getting the results we want, and has the moral advantage of solving a public problem with public money. (At the very least, it would be a blessing to the half-million people who, by the CBO’s estimate, would be out of work as a result of the proposed minimum-wage rise.)
A further disadvantage of minimum-wage increases is that businesses will do what they can to pass along cost increases to their customers, which can cause a general price inflation. Worse, because so many minimum-wage jobs are in local service-industry businesses, particularly groceries and fast-food restaurants, such price increases are naturally borne in large part by members of the same low-income community that the wage increases are intended to help.
Although it is something of a digression, I also think it would be remiss to discuss the minimum wage without touching on its dark origins in the Progressive ideology that prevailed in the first part of the 20th century. The original aim of minimum-wage laws was not to lift the lowest stratum of the underclass out of poverty; it was to starve them out of existence. The idea was simple enough: one might hire a man of the lowest order for the most menial job at a pittance, and so enable him to scratch out a meager existence, but one that was livable by his rock-bottom standards; in doing so, you enabled the propagation of the least fit, to the detriment of society as a whole. E.A. Ross, a prominent Progressive intellectual and eugenicist (the two were generally synonymous), wrote that “the Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.’ The idea of the minimum wage, as understood by the forward-looking intellectuals of the era, was simple enough: nobody, given the choice of hiring a superior or an inferior man for the same wage, would choose the latter, and so the least fit would gradually fade away. (Much the same logic was behind the Progressive crusade for freely available contraception among the lower classes; it was conceived, for want of a better word, as a way to lower the birthrate among the ‘unfit’.) A 1986 working paper by the CBO also acknowledges this effect, saying that the minimum wage will tend to cause employers to hire more experienced adults if they can no longer get teenagers at a discount, thereby depressing employment prospects for young people.
Finally, I have to say that the whole debate about a minimum-wage increase, and about how best to improve the prospects of low-skilled workers in America, seems a bit surreal when we seem resolutely committed to importing millions of bottom-rung immigrants every year. It seems almost childishly obvious that the very first thing we ought to do to improve the prospects for low-wage Americans is to turn off the spigot of cheap imported labor. Such is the power, however, of the unholy alliance between Republican business interests seeking the cheapest possible workforce, and Democrats seeking new voters and new clients for public services, that the prospects for American workers seeking to rise into the middle class are very bad indeed — and are going to stay that way, regardless of what happens to the minimum wage.
WSJ columnist James Taranto has a regular feature in his Best of the Web newlsetter, in which he posts news items where obvious cause-and-effect relationships are presented as baffling paradoxes. A typical such item might be a headline that says “Despite Historically Low Crime Rate, Incarcerations Are At All-Time High”.
He had a good one today, from an article by Heather Knight in the San Francisco Chronicle:
San Francisco spends $165 million a year on services for homeless people, but all that money hasn’t made a dent in the homeless population in at least nine years.
Baffling, no?
I’m working late tonight, as I often do on Tuesdays. To ease my toil, I generally listen to classical music on Pandora; one of today’s highlights was the pyrotechnic allegro ma non troppo from the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for Violin and Orchestra in A Minor, by Camille Saint-SaÁ«ns, as played by the incomparable, and instantly recognizable, Jascha Heifetz.
I couldn’t remember how long ago Heifetz had died, so I took a moment just now to look him up on Wikipedia. (It was 1987.)
The article contained two little anecdotes that I enjoyed so much I thought I’d post them here. The first took place at Heifetz’s Carnegie Hall debut, when he was only sixteen:
On October 27, 1917, Heifetz played for the first time in the United States, at Carnegie Hall in New York, and became an immediate sensation. Fellow violinist Mischa Elman in the audience asked “Do you think it’s hot in here?”, whereupon the pianist Leopold Godowsky, in the next seat, imperturbably replied, “Not for pianists.”
The second: somewhat later, Heifetz told Groucho Marx that he had been earning his living as a musician since the age of seven. Groucho’s repsonse: “And I suppose before that you were just a bum.”
OK — back to my oar, or I’ll get a taste of the lash.
PS — one more thing, from the One Eyed Man: jokes for intellectuals.
It was a sad day today: the lovely Nina and I drove to Philadelphia to attend a memorial service for the twenty-eight-year-old son of some dear friends. The young man, who died suddenly and unexpectedly, had made a very deep and very positive impression on a great many people’s lives, and hundreds were in attendance.
Things like this are a shocking reminder of the evanescence and uncertainty of life, and the permanence of what lies beyond life. You would think that by my age I’d need no reminders of this, but the fact of our brevity, and of our insignificance in the immensity of time, is not an easy thing to bear — and so we do whatever we can to distract ourselves, to deny, to turn away, to forget, to hurry back to the waking sleep that we call ordinary consciousness.
From Marcus Aurelius:
Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.
At the very end of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, Beelzebub is asked by his beloved grandson Hassein what would be necessary for the awakening and salvation of humanity, if indeed such a thing is possible at all. Beelzebub replied:
That every one of these unfortunates, during the process of existence, should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death, as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rest.
Aurelius again:
Come back now to your true senses; recall your true self; awake from slumber, and recognize that they were only dreams that troubled you; and as you looked on them, so look now upon what meets your waking eyes.
Goodbye, Daniel.
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
While all eyes are on Ukraine, it would be easy to lose sight of an earlier U.S. foreign-policy triumph: Libya. Has it really been a year and a half since we stopped having to worry about how to spell ‘Khadaffy’? How time flies.
Anyway, in case you were wondering, it’s going straight to hell — which won’t surprise anyone, except perhaps the people who made it all possible.
For some reason, we haven’t heard much about Libya from Foggy Bottom, lately. I guess our work there is done.
