Crispin Sartwell's Blog

MAGA -- A Rough Beast Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Not Just in Pennsylvania

"Much of cosmopolitan America holds to a progressive framework of bodily autonomy, boundless tolerance and group rights ��� a largely post-religious morality applied with near-religious intensity. But as a religious person (on my better days), what concerns me are the perverse and dangerous liberties many believers have taken with their own faith. Much of what considers itself Christian America has assumed the symbols and identity of white authoritarian populism ��� an alliance that is a serious, unfolding threat to liberal democracy." Michael Gerson, WAPO, 9-1-22

"Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;
to understand, than to be understood; to love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life." Francis of Assisi 

Michael Gerson's lengthy but readable column on the abyss that Evangelical Christianity now straddles that Christians should read and consider while those of us struggling to understand how they got into this position should read with sadness, hope and charity. The systemic and Existentialist theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich wrote in his most approachable text, "The Dynamics of Faith" that "faith is about ultimate concerns."

The union between MAGA and "What would Jesus do?" is troubling for many reasons. Gerson's approach is to help all of us to understand how it came about as well as why it is a mistake yet perhaps as much an opportunity.

 

 

Getting out of this world alive versus being acclaimed as the absolute best at something/

I work to understand what values we can live by in a world as connected, chaotic, and potentially catastrophic as the present.                                                                                                                                                                       -- Avram Alpert

Alpert is one of those public intellectuals who manages to straddle the academic, publishing, and actually thinking about what he's thinking about. In some ways, his "work" as a lecturer and Fellow/Lecturer at The New Institute in Hamburg, a Fellow and Lecturer at Princeton and a Lecturer at Rutgers reminds me a bit of Crispin Sartwell. For me, Crispy seems to have the same underlying goal, striving to understand relevant values for this new way of living. Crispin has just chosen a more structured and traditional way of doing that work. Another way to look at it, of course, is that being a Fellow and Lecturer or being a professor of philosophy is their way of having a day job that's relevant to their work. Alpert's new book, The Good Enough Life strikes me as a direct way of doing his work while possibly working at a side gig, being a writer.  

One of my High School Teachers, a Diocesan priest who was nicknamed Charlie the Tuna because of an similarity to the protagonist in Starkist's advertising, presented us with a philosophical problem. He said that he was perfect. That got a laugh as well as starting a discussion. He asked if we didn't agree that only God was perfect. It was, after all, a Catholic high school -- and for sake of argument, we agreed. He then asked if we agreed that it was our duty to seek perfection in every way. Bit more complicated, but based on the Baltimore Catechism, we were conditioned to agree. He then asked if that didn't mean we were doomed because we could never achieve the goal of our duty, to seek perfection. Muttering in the crowd. Ok, if we had duty to seek what we could never achieve, how to resolve it? And, if only God is perfect, wasn't our solution to seek to be perfectly imperfect, and he figured that he nailed that one...so?
 


I have struggled with that particular dogleg for a long time now; as the greatest Country poet of the 20th Century put in his last musical release before he died, "No matter how we struggle and strive, we'll never get out of this world alive." I don't believe Hank Williams was advocating giving up; rather, I think he was suggesting that we recognize as he did that we were here for the struggle, not for the acclaim that comes with the being recognized as the greatest. As soon as we get recognized as that, we're going to fall, because somebody better would come along.


This new book, The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert presents a more complex yet simple solution. It should be enough for each of us to be recognized as the greatest something rather than seeking universal acclaim once, and then go on with our work in this life. As another country-music poet, Emmylou Harris, sang "I was born to run/to get ahead of the rest/and all that I wanted was to be best//To live free, and be someone/I was born to be fast, I was born to run."
 


Alpert credits another writer with the solution to this philosophical and ethical maze. " Michael Walzer���s influential notion of complex equality. Social life, Walzer says, divides itself into many different spheres: business, science, athletics and so forth. We want those spheres to be internally coherent, such that the most recognized athletes are the most athletically talented, the most successful businesspeople are the ones who offer the best products at the best prices, and the most celebrated scientists are those who are the most scientifically brilliant. Accordingly, the spheres should be externally sealed off from each other. Top athletes should not use their celebrity to make millions endorsing sub-par business products. Successful businesspeople should not use their wealth to sway scientific research agendas. Gifted scientists should not figure out how to dope athletes in technically legal ways."
 


Avram seems to admit that change might be a far reach, but still, if society as well as individuals accepted the "good enough" goal, we might be spared Charles Barkley hawking sandwiches and Doug Flutie supporting Frank Thomas in hyping a Testosterone product.

 

 

 

Real, fundamental change or more Progressive "Tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing"

Long before I got to this article, I knew that the Supreme Court had published its ruling on Abortion, and that it was as draconian and out of sync with American society as it is possible to imagine. Justice Thomas (Holy Cross, Class of 72) seldom publishes an opinion but his opinion says that other aspects of life -- contraception, same sex marriage, and anything covered by the concept of privacy -- are now open for re-evaluation. Because if Roe goes, and it is in fact now gone, the modern legal concept of privacy is dead.

I knew all this because my inbox was staggering under the weight of requests, actually demands for my signature; and, probably, demands for $5 or 10 or whatever amount I could send whomever was asking for that signature.

I don't normally sign petitions, and probably won't start doing so again. When Clarence Thomas and I were wandering around Worcester, our daily travels would begin by visiting the campus center to check our mail, and maybe get a cup of coffee. The lobby of the campus center during those years (September 1969 - June 1973) was filled daily with student organizations collecting signatures for worthy causes. Most of them wanted to stop racism, cure poverty, end the war in Vietnam and end sexism. I generally signed most of them, as did all students of good mind and heart. We were imitating the Chaplain in the Animals' number Sky Pilot, being "good holy men" by attesting to values we were doing nothing credible to achieve or promote.

 

Signing petitions doesn't do much of anything, except get lunatics and fanatics on election slates and allow fools, charlatans and other oddities of the left and right a vehicle to make every corner our own American Speakers' corner.

At this point, life is fairly simple. If you want to preserve the rights of women to manage their own bodies and health, if you want to preserve the right to privacy, if you want to preserve equal rights for gay marriage, if you want to preserve the right to be screwed up and gnarly, then you have one choice going forward. The Republicans have won their 50 years of struggle for a third awakening of religious zealots and various fellow travelers. It's going to take a lot to re-establish the rights of women to manage their own health; it's going to take a lot to preserve the rights to gay marriage, to inter-racial marriage, to contraception and on and on and on. Battles we all thought won, fragile victory or not, through Roe and the modern concept of privacy.

It's simple. Vote Democratic. Send money to Democratic campaigns. And do so every election cycle until a more moderate court can re-visit these issues and a more realistic set of legislators are sitting in the halls of Congress.

If you want to distribute, sign and endorse petitioning efforts, great. But if you don't vote straight D long enough to get veto proof and filibuster proof majorities in the Congress, you're going to have the same meaningless impact of those petitions that the future Justice Thomas and First Sergeant and peripatetic thinker Mike Farrell signed almost 60 years ago on Worcester mornings from September to June.

OK, I Figured Out Gaslighting, but What the Hell is Cancel Culture?

i was glancing through the Times Literary Supplement when I saw a commentary that basically laid out Cancel Culture as bitched about by fans of Prince Harry and fans of the Traditional Experience. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were accused of being denizens of Cancel Culture, attempting to cancel the monarchy be saying it didn't matter anymore to them. That anyway seemed to be the way the Dons and Doyens we Yanks imagine wandering through the House of Lords. The Joe Strummer wannabe's found the bitching about the Sussexes be tossed in the maw of the great Kraken of Tory Cancel Culture...

My own thought is that Cancel Culture is a way for Right Wing twits to bitch about encroaching realities. Might be working against them -- when was the last time anyone mentioned Ayn Rand in normal conversation. Encroaching reality might be doing us a favor if it keeps forcing these folks into a smaller and smaller corner. 

However, through no real fault of the universe, I was presented with a couple of articles that addressed in different ways the actual role of Cancel Culture...one that has been around for a long time, since literacy and probably before that. 

The morning began with a tag from Downeaster Jeff Thompson, who is one of the more genuine and grounded of the former blogger occasionally stepping out but usually hanging out dropping logic and decency bombs in the role Facebook Malcontent Primo. Jeff was posting an article by Jacob Bacharach, a NGO manager probably because of the hours, a novelist and essayist of some merit, and most germane, a blogger that would get Swift to come down from heaven or up from hell to make an appearance. This was an appearance not of IOZ but of Jake, but it was absolutely great. 

The article appeared in The New Republic, to which I have now subscribed. What the hell, just something else I will probably not read all that much. The GEN X Cancel Culture Warriors Who Never Grew Up is well written and is worth reading just as an exercise in criticism. It also has some excellent points. I could fill a longer article than Crispin wants me to with just pieces of the work. This is one example that made me understand a bit...

There is also something regressive and a bit adolescent about this sort of thinking, as though all the cancel culture complainers long for are evenings at the debate club and late-night rap sessions full of grand philosophical gestures and free from the grotty pressures of real life. It may be why so many cancel culture critics are fixated on the college campuses they themselves have long since left. The concession and compromises of adulthood are rarely as fun or as heroic as the caffeinated debates of their youth, when they could say and do almost anything, parked in a beanbag chair in a red-brick dorm.These thinkers are unwilling or unable to grasp that debate alone cannot resolve many of the problems we face���climate, inequality, poverty, disease. They are not mere exercises. They are material and real, and they are immune to cleverness and outrageousness. They require solidarity and collective action as much as they require argument...

One of the other things that I read in passing usually is AEON which is a bit more intellectual and usually has an article about some philosophical issue, another about some aspect of social science or it's intersection with SCIENCE, which can be interesting as well as scary at times. Recently, Aeon began adding articles from PSYCHE which is oriented toward looking at just about anything from a psychological point of view -- scientific, social science, speculatory, historical or philosophical. 

This article dealt with the forbidden books and texts that are starting to come out the woodwork of academe.

What secret and subversive writings from centuries ago say today was written by John Christian Laursen, a Harvard BS and JD who then was bitten by some irradiated spider and he went on to a PhD in either political science, intellectual history, or philosophy. He's teaches in the Political Science Department, at University of California at Riverside, which is intriguing for a number of reasons. He has always shown a bit of a twist in his publications -- hell, it may well be a cork screw shaped crucifix. His first book, which based on the timing is probably based at least in part on his dissertation is The Politics of Skepticism in the Ancients, Montaigne, Hume, and Kant. These days, it looks like he is focusing on Clandestine Philosophy, which is the evaluation and study of subversive, heretical and weird manuscripts and pieces from back in the day  that the Church and State had a burning interest in Cancel Culture. If they decided that they didn't agree with or couldn't find something in the Bible to justify your thinking on, you'd make a guest appearance at the next auto-de-fa. It's an interesting approach and he believes sheds some life on how we should look at these things. 

Laursen says that it's difficult to call the Clandestine Writings "Philosophy" because that requires some degree of structure, logic and organization. No guarantees here -- the stuff is all over the place. Some patrons of this stuff included censors and royalty -- the royalty for whatever reason those people ever do anything and the censors because they saw it as a steam valve that was less painful than a boiler burst. So, perhaps the inner circles at CPAC and the Federalist Society share a historical space with the Rosicurians and the Illuminati. Or, perhaps and probably, not. 

"Letting off steam might be more important in social life than we���ve recognised. Suppressing what we really think is widely understood to be bad for our emotional health. People who have had to hide their thoughts in order to appear as conformists to the prevailing orthodoxies have often developed deep psychological problems, which in turn can lead to ���explosions���. Meanwhile, if people can express themselves, even only clandestinely, they might be relieved of this pressure."

One thing that makes me think this entire issue may be as moot as a Ted Cruz flight itinerary is fairly simple. There is so much media, bouncing around off our ears and eyes and screens and loudspeakers that Cancel Culture is basically overtaken by events. Stuff comes at you so fast that you have to struggle to stay afloat. About the time folks get the idea of what you're saying, it's neither relevant nor interesting. 

Chuck Prophet is a musician, something of an auteur and band doctor. He joined his buddy Alejandro Escovedo's backing group The Sensitive Boys for a couple of years to just help with the sound. The sound after he left got a bit darker, but still had the positive sort of energy. 

So, for homework, listen to Chuck Prophet's The Land that Time Forgot, read one of Bacharach's novels and read Terry Southern's Candy. Compare and contrast in 500 words or less. 

 

Nailed it...Sideways!

I am not sure where Dave Barry's stuff normally appears, but the annual year end summary is always helpful in gaining perspective on the past year. It may not be a valid perspective, because he does still drink a lot of concoctions involving coconut oil, metamucil and Everclear, but it is a perspective. And, it is never wrong...in it's underlying themes. At times, I picture his son calling him on Christmas Day and asking if Dave could send him some of the shelf Levitra because like the old TV commercial that they used to watch during the Superbowl, he wants to make his passes go longer and straighter. He would start crying, and wonder why he thought leaving the Miami Herald for the Boise Gazette was a good idea...

It's a shame, really. Like most years, he should win the Pulitzer for best description of the Zeitgeist and myraid of rough beasts preparing to assault Jerusalem. He wrote:

"We���re trying to think of something nice to say about 2020.
Okay, here goes: Nobody got killed by the murder hornets. As far as we know.
That���s pretty much it.

"In the past, writing these annual reviews, we have said harsh things about previous years. We owe those years an apology. Compared to 2020, all previous years, even the Disco Era, were the golden age of human existence.

"This was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn���t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of genuine, unadulterated happiness were when we were able to buy toilet paper."

So, Zeitgeist nailed. Read on those who can read. If you're Trump, have Eric and Don Jr draw pictures and have Ivanka write some one line explanations. "Remember March Daddeee? It sucked." Something like that.

The Sound of Silence Can Be Really a Lot Better Than the Make a Noise Approach

"We must go on as a nation, and as families. Of course you still love your uncle, even if he is bellowing about stolen elections at Christmas dinner, just as you love your sister-in-law even while she���s trying to ruin a wedding reception by holding forth on socialist saboteurs. But neither they nor the millions of other diehards deserve our engagement. The sooner we refuse to continue such conversations, the sooner we might return to being a serious nation. " -- Tom Nichols

Tom Nichols is a very interesting guy. He's a Professor at the Naval War College, writes books about things like why knowing what the hell you're doing is no longer considered important in this country, and writes for The Atlantic. He has made a point throughout his written career that he writes not in his role as a Professor at the Naval War College, but rather as a civilian-citizen who is exercising his freedom of speech. Not that what he writes is really so controversial; he just is shielding the institution and himself from people like the Trump administration.


 


He appears often on CNN, MSNBC and PBS. I caught him last night, and when this particular article was referenced in Veterans Today, I wanted to share it immediately the contrast between media makes me think it should be worth reading for everyone. . It's one of the best arguments I have seen lately for the idea of silence when talking is not a productive strategy. Or, as Marcus Aurelius puts it, "Having no opinion is always an option."


 


He acknowledges that it's probably going to be hard; we are a nation of talkers, and free expression is kind of in our DNA. Except, when there is no sense to the conversation. Should I find myself on a panel someplace discussing the election, you can expect me to be as opinionated as possible. I don't forsee that happening, by the way. But, why do I want to argue about Trump when I'm buying a cheeseburger or with my neighbor right after greeting him with "Merry Christmas?"
 
There's an old joke that's really apropos here. "Don't wrestle with a pig. It will annoy the pig, and you'll get dirty." I'm certain that many of them feel the same way about us, by the way. Silence can work for all of us here...

 


 

The Reverse Placebo Effect and the Miracle of Psychiatric Medication

 

Piece I wrote in the '90s. No newspaper would buy it, for some reason. I want to link it on Twitter, so I'm rolling it out.

SSRIs and the RPE

By Crispin Sartwell

Recent studies suggest that the anti-depressant medications known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) may drive you to suicide, even as they improve your mood. This apparently paradoxical result should lead to a deep re-thinking of medical science as we know it.

My own research suggests that the pro-suicide effect of SSRIs is not a matter of brain chemistry or serotonin levels. It���s just that when they tell you that you need anti-depressants, they���re telling you you���re depressed, which is extremely depressing.

Depression is bad enough, but depression about the fact that you are depressed is an infinite downward spiral into hell. The more depressed you are, the more depressed you get. And the more depressed you get, the more depressed you are. Once you enter this process, there is nowhere to go but down, down, into the maw of death itself: the ultimate treatment facility.

Before you know it, you find yourself biting the Cobain stick.

Now on the other hand, many doctors seem to believe one problem is that SSRIs are being overprescribed. So let���s say your depression is misdiagnosed. When the whole thing starts out you���re a happy-go-lucky sap.

Then the fact that they think you need anti-depressants is enough to start you on the same downward spiral. You start asking yourself: if I���m so depressed, why do I feel so happy all the time? Pretty soon your trust of your own senses is entirely compromised and you become radically incapable of self-reflection. Your very selfhood itself is shattered like a cheap mirror.

In short, misdiagnoses of depression have probably dropped millions of friendly suckers into an agony of existential despair and obsessive self-loathing.

Before you know it, you���re swallowing that Marilyn cocktail.

But should you survive this far, the situation becomes far worse, because the doctor indicates that ��� whether you are suffering or not ��� you���ll feel better when you take your meds. But because you are on anti-depressants (see above) you are bummed out to an extent that matches or exceeds the relief offered by the medication itself (and I am not denying that anti-depressants are dramatically effective).

So the doctor increases your dosage or drops in another med, which has precisely the same double-edged effect. You return to the doctor, and you catch just that hint of an expression that you know means: Dude. If the anti-depressants don���t work, there���s really no hope. You feel that you���ve been condemned to a lifetime of despair, even if all the time you���re perfectly happy.

Before you know it, you���re doing that Virginia Woolf doggy paddle.

A placebo is a completely ineffective dose of an inert substance, which sometimes has a positive effect. The anti-depressant/suicide connection is an illustration of the ���reverse placebo effect��� (RPE), in which what are actually effective medications have no actual effects, or actually have negative effects.

Though this conclusion is only provisional and awaits future study, it may be that all medications are subject to a reverse-placebo effect: for example the fact that you need massive doses of opioids only convinces you that you must be in severe pain. Then the more effective a medicine becomes, the worse its results.

It���s enough to make you bake that Sylvia Plath casserole.

 

Freedom, Fear and the Knock in the Middle of the Night...

 

FREEDOM

FROMM and ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM are popping up often enough at the moment to think we might have realized that we've had a pretty good working hypothesis about the "end of Liberal Democracy" and "the rise of the New Right." Of course, he figured it out a long time and the fact that we re-discover it whenever freedom is threatened means it's possible to at least remember if not prevent. Fromm left Germany and after a year in Geneva, accepted a teaching position at Columbia University in 1935. His approach to psychoanalysis was informed by his early academic work in law and graduate work in sociology and philosophical psychology. Escape From Freedom jumps up the university reading lists whenever the pendulum in this country moves toward repression and authoritarianism. Approachable and crisp, his work provides a great working model for understanding we're doing to ourselves and why. I've been meaning to revisit it for a while, and this piece in the The Guardian will make me wander in to my stacks and find my copy. From the Guardian article by Dr. Michele Gelfand, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland:

"The philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm first identified this predicament in his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom. The gist of it is this: when people perceive an increase in disorder, they feel tremendous anxiety. Inevitably, this anxiety leads to a quest for security. To bring a sense of safety back into their lives, they latch on to authoritarianism and conformity. As Fromm noted, this often leads to ���a readiness to accept any ideology and any leader if only he offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual���s life���. He had observed this in Germany, which he fled in 1933: ���Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds,��� he wrote."

Anxiety is probably not the best word today, since we are always anxious about most things in our lives. Probably because the amount of stimulus has increased tremendously over the decades and because some of us recognize the symptoms if not the causes of what we observe around us, the concept I keep hearing is "Existential Dread." From Ari Melber and Hip Hop Artists on MSNBC to music reviews of Dustin Welch's "Amateur Theatre" to George Will, the concept is starting to surface a lot. Worth considering before it gets it's own TV show. Fromm wasn't an Existentialist, although he studied with Karl Jaspers while a doctoral student at Heidelberg in the 1920s. He was certainly influenced by Existentialism, being a contemporary of Hannah Arendt and Sartre. So before the TV show comes out with a theme song about "Here comes the Zeitgeist," Escape From Freedom is available on Amazon and Google and any other place you care to look.

FEAR

NEWSPEAK Comes to National Archives, Creating New Orwellian Discipline, NEWPICTURE

As a non-partisan, non-political federal agency, we blurred references to the President���s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy .Our mission is to safeguard and provide access to the nation���s most important federal records, and our exhibits are one way in which we connect the American people to those records. Modifying the image was an attempt on our part to keep the focus on the records.-- Statement by Miriam Kleimen, Spokesperson, National Archives, Email to WAPO, January 17, 2019.

Oddly enough, this really angers me. History is a lot of things, but neat and non-controversial it definitely is not and never has been. Upset about "vagina?" on a posterboard in a crowd of a million or so angry people? Really...take a junior college course in human anatomy? Upset about "pussy" in this context? Get a life, and talk to a 12 year old about sexual body parts: today, that's a  tame term in a heated conversation. Don't want to let people either living or in the future know that someone thought God hates Trump? No, you were just avoiding controversy.... So, as that Genteel Stylist and Disciple of Orwell in the late 20th Century, Norman Mailer, would say...Fuck you. Orwell was a bit more elegant in his approach. If you've forgotten Winston Smith and his pal Syme in 1984 , you might re-visit it. Both are minor functionaries in Big Brother's Party in Europa, and they discuss their work. Syme is a lexicographer, although that complicated idea is probably no longer in Newspeak. He's working on a new edition of the approved Dictionary, and explains it purpose to Smith, Orwell's Candide in this worst of all possible worlds.
 

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . Syme to Winston Smith, Chapter 5, 1984, Australia, Gutenberg Project

The world has changed since the suffragettes, and yet the issues remain the same in so many ways. The idea of women in trousers -- Trousers! oh my eyes?" -- was too hard for some people to bear 100 years ago. How about women in "Pussy" caps? Oh, my eyes. God hates Trump? Franklin Graham says he's the chosen one...STONE THEM!
 
Hey, archivists, bloggers, historians, philosophers, and graffiti artists! Be freaking serious about your responsibility in your work and show the history as it is, three years or so after the inauguration of a
vilely obscene, vulgar and criminal fool and charlatan. Preserve the records as they are; any time you publish them, publish them accurately. Interesting that one of the pictures used is owned by someone else, and the National Archives needed permission in order to alter it. Does any rational analyst really think that protecting the eyes of the well-meaning children children studying the poster of the exhibit was the reason for this well-meaning busy-body exercise. Or fear that some Trump functionary looking for something to be bothered about as a deep state exercise might alight on this one, or worse that the Ogre-Hyena of Mir a Lago might encounter the poster and demand the head on a platter of some clerical staff and archivists? 
 
Come on, people. At least be realistic, or we're a bit closer to Syme's vision of the future. Hell, we're already neck deep in Mailer's.
Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?...

.

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. I praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

 

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

homo econonomicus: replaced by saints

For quite awhile now, the human being as portrayed in some traditional strands of economics has been embattled. This is the person who is motivated only by self-interest, and pursues that interest by and large rationally: that is, by means well-suited to achieve it. This picture, often associated with Adam Smith but perhaps more clearly endorsed by Thomas Hobbes, e..g., allows one to 'model' markets with things like game and decision theory. Many have found this picture of us both disgusting and non-empirical (evil and false, to put it plainly): one of my heroes, David Graeber, rails against it in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, for example. But I would caution against just endorsing its opposite, a move that is understandable and perhaps even admirable, but which equally lands you in the realm of the obviously false, and makes perfectly nice professors into mere ideologues.

Paul Collier, an Oxford economics professor, takes 'economic man' to task yet again as he reviews a number of economic books in the Dec 6 Times Literary Supplement (Greed is Dead) (really? dead?), especially Nicholas Christakis's book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society:

The book concludes that "humans everywhere are pre-wired to make a particular kind of society - one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning." Christakis demonstrates how we have evolved to enjoy sociality and to be prosocial. Humans crave to belong to a group. We are prepared to forgo individual material rewards in pursuit of this. The prosociality comes from our genes...: being prosocial, we co-operate, forming habitats that promote further prosociality, and through this common group behaviour we have gradually changed the gene pool. Since we are all programmed with these genes, vast swathes of our behavior are common. This is why, as a species, we have been hard-wired for morality.

Let's leave aside a few things, such as the bristling unattractiveness and buzzwordy pseudo-scientificity of the prose, which has also proven to be a problem for the discipline as a whole. Also, let's leave aside the effortless identification of 'prosocial' with moral (many moral systems insist that you have to resist the group in various situations, e.g.). This just says that human nature is good, and tacks on an evolutionary explanation (one put forward, with data, by Peter Kropotkin in the late 19th century). And I allow that the claim that we are 'hard-wired' (x) for cooperation, or that cooperation is selected for, is entirely plausible; or I might have said, even obvious.

But just like the position it rejects, this one cannot explain a whole bunch of human behavior. Looking squarely at the human world right now, or indeed at any time: could it have emerged from a species that has evolved to, is gene-'programmed' to, make a society of 'love, friendship, and cooperation'? Not hardly, though it's sort of sweet if y'all believe that. I think, if you are doing science, you had better look at how people actually behave and then, if you insist, speculate on how these behaviors were selected for. Now, we are not greed machines and there is all sorts of cooperative activity everywhere. Also there is all kinds of killing, competition, exploitation, and so on. Looking at the thing squarely, we are obviously not entirely "prosocial" and not entirely "anti-social."

What the idea that human nature is super-good allows you to do is blame neo-liberalism or something for all the terrible ways we actually are. But however, if there is such a thing as neo-liberalism, it was itself created by human beings, no? Human beings that, for Collier and Christakis, were violating their own genes. Also, obviously human behavior has been a mixed bag of competition and cooperation throughout (and again, these do not at all track 'evil' and 'good'), and we must speculate that both are selected for, which is plausible

That we have evolved into pacifistic self-sacrificers and universal lovers is obviously, obviously, no more true than that we have evolved into individualistic greed machines. If the discipline of economics is just going to flow toward the opposite of what it once said, it is going to be no more empirical than it ever was. These positions are both political ideologies, and if the discipline can't give us anything but that, it should lapse into silence.