They kill you, but
September 1, 2020
Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Me too. Here’s a map.
THE MAILBOX IN THE WEEDS ✉️
Ask me any question and I’ll answer it in a special newsletter edition four weeks from now. Inspired by Wait But Why’s Mailbag (hat tip XOV).
Rules:
All questions are submitted anonymously. I can’t see the identity of the submitter.
I will answer all questions. Any questions that I don’t answer I will include in a list for transparency, excluding those that may compromise my pseudonymity.
Try to ask interesting questions and I’ll try to write interesting answers.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
In 1946, Salvador Dalí was commissioned to illustrate an edition of The Essays of Michel De Montaigne.
‘That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die’ | Salvador Dalí
‘Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received’ | Salvador Dalí
PESTILENCE & PESTICIDES 🦟
In a March edition of the newsletter, I wrote: “I was going to write about the coronavirus but instead I advise you to go outside, find a nice pile of dirt, and stick your hands in it. Then just kind of rub your hands around in the dirt and mull things over until you feel better.” Pairs nicely with the NYT’s Gardening Made Me Happier. It Will Work for You Too: “When I’m angry — which is often these days — I pull weeds. Getting my hands in the dirt untangles the knots that form in my stomach.”
This week, several friends referred to an inevitable second lockdown this coming fall, in which we all stay inside and watch Halloween movies. Short of a September surprise vaccine, they may be right. I’m not sure how to feel about that. On one hand — my friends and I have become much more adept at the sub-ten-person social gathering, dinner, drinks, etc. — in general, society has a short attention span and the era of packed bars seems a lifetime ago. On the other hand, I fear the same anxieties of the first lockdown with worse weather and darker days.
At what point in this pandemic is wearing a shoddy homemade mask socially unacceptable? Nobody wears shirts they sewed together out of old pillowcases. At what point are we expected — or mandated — to buy masks from the same brands we buy clothes from?
CONTENT CROP 🌾
Lanier had been early to the idea that these platforms were addictive and even harmful—that their algorithms made people feel bad, divided them against one another, and actually changed who they were, in an insidious and threatening manner. That because of this, social media was in some ways “worse than cigarettes,” as Lanier put it at one point, “in that cigarettes don't degrade you. They kill you, but you're still you.”
note: I’m generally wary of profiles because I think they over-fawn in exchange for access, but this one has been very widely circulated in newsletters this week and contains your weekly dose of techno-pessimism
What Does Boredom Do to Us—and for Us? || The New Yorker
Boredom, it’s become clear, has a history, a set of social determinants, and, in particular, a pungent association with modernity. Leisure was one precondition: enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence to have time on their hands that required filling. Modern capitalism multiplied amusements and consumables, while undermining spiritual sources of meaning that had once been conferred more or less automatically. Expectations grew that life would be, at least some of the time, amusing, and people, including oneself, interesting—and so did the disappointment when they weren’t. In the industrial city, work and leisure were cleaved in a way that they had not been in traditional communities, and work itself was often more monotonous and regimented.
. . .
David Graeber, in his influential “bullshit jobs” thesis, argues that the vast expansion of administrative jobs—he cites, for example, “whole new industries,” such as financial services and telemarketing—means that “huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.” The result can be soul-choking misery. What Adorno called “objective dullness” is at hand, although, Graeber cautions, “where for some, pointlessness exacerbates boredom, for others it exacerbates anxiety.”
note: I started this newsletter because I was bored and now it occasionally gets me in trouble and sucks up my leisure time so reader BEWARE boredom
Reform Is Driven by Rising Elites || Palladium Mag
This is characteristic of modern Western elites, selected for their ability to advance a narrative, or, at the very least, obscure challenges to it. What looks like idiocy or confusion can often be tactical, especially in a “transparent” and televisual era where something has to be said. Donald Trump’s weaponized distraction is now well-known; but while his style is unique, the chaos that results is not. Nancy Pelosi is known for being intentionally confusing in remarks to the press, obscuring her next move. When dealing with the statements and actions of elites, one must be careful not to automatically take them at face value. The ability to get away with making seemingly “bad” decisions is often an indicator of power, as one might hypothesize in the cases of Donald Trump, Kanye West, or a multitude of other celebrities.
note: “the elites” are at it again — but this article (by the mysterious Samo Burja), rather than being the ol’ rote denunciation of elites, is a realistic attempt to explain how existing and rising elites function and interact
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
Frequent readers of this newsletter know that I love sheep and I am pleased to share some important sheep news with you: the world’s most expensive sheep ever has sold for ~$500,000 at an auction.
Look at this magnificent creature. This guy (definitely a male, given the available evidence) looks more like a guard dog than a sheep. Especially intriguing — dare I say almost disturbing — are the markings just below his eyes which make it look like this sheep has a double set of eyes. At first glance, I thought that’s why he was so expensive: because he had four eyes. And while it’s only an illusion, can you imagine a herd of four-eyed guard-sheep charging around your farm? Some real sci-fi-pastoralist shit.
The buyers (sheep breeders) are clearly chuffed as all hell to acquire this creature:
"He's just an outstanding animal. He's a massive lamb with great confirmation and character, some of which is what breeding is all about.
"But with the pedigree you start looking at the smaller details of the lamb - you look at his head, the hair colour, the colour around his eyes, legs, he was just perfect in every way."
Sad to think most people will go through life without ever being described in such glowing terms as Double Diamond, the half-a-million-dollar sheep. But he deserves it. He’s just perfect in every way.
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
The Roanoke Island colony, also known as “The Lost Colony,” played an oddly prominent role in my imagination and early education about the American colonies. As we were taught, John White left the Roanoke Island colony (in modern-day North Carolina) in 1587 to get more supplies from England. When he returned in 1590, he found the colony abandoned without any sign of a struggle and the words “CROATOAN” carved on a post. He never found the colonists, which included his daughter and granddaughter, and returned to England.
New research shows that the settlers simply went to live with their friends, the nearby Native Americans… whose tribe was called “the Croatoans”:
The evidence shows the colony left Roanoke Island with the friendly Croatoans to settle on Hatteras Island. They thrived, ate well, had mixed families and endured for generations. More than a century later, explorer John Lawson found natives with blue eyes who recounted they had ancestors who could “speak out of a book,” Lawson wrote.
In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like much of a mystery at all. The colonists left a sign explicitly saying who they were going to live with: the Croatoans. And “they thrived, ate well, had mixed families and endured for generations.” How’s that for a happy ending?
THE GOVERNMENT OBSERVATORY ON THE HILL ABOVE MY FARM 👁
I’m listening to an audiobook of Johnny Cash reading the New Testament and boy is the Gospel of John wildly different from the preceding three Gospels. I’m a bit embarrassed at my own illiteracy on the foundational texts of western civilization (the Bible, among others). This book review in Tablet discusses J.M. Coetzee’s trilogy of novels, The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus all of which conspicuously don’t mention Jesus at all — the entertainment of reading Coetzee’s trilogy lies in recognizing the veiled references to the New Testament, many of which I’m sure I’d miss.
Ironically, Christianity now occupies a place in secular culture that has long been familiar to Judaism—it is esoteric, a body of knowledge shared by a dedicated few.
It makes me wonder what other connections in my readings and watchings and wanderings I’ve missed out of pure ignorance. I find great joy in allusions and connections between far-flung stories or objects, and fear that I’ve already failed to recognize the lion’s share of these junctures in time and space. And while the New Testament is scandalous and entertaining enough, the thought of reading foundational figures or texts like the Federalist Papers has always struck me with a heavy sense of apathy and listlessness.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
(Memoir, 1987. Sixteen dollars.)
As a child I read hoping to learn everything, so I could be like my father. I hoped to combine my father’s grasp of information and reasoning with my mother’s will and vitality. But the books were leading me away. They would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether, so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else. So the Midwest nourishes us (Pittsburgh is the Midwest’s eastern edge) and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters, and the forested river valleys with the blue Appalachian Mountains to the east of us and the broad great plains to the west. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possiblities. Mother knew we would go; she encouraged us.
note: While I’d recommend Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Teaching a Stone to Talk before An American Childhood, the fact remains that, even for a book about growing up in lily-white Pittsburgh in the 1950s, Dillard writes in amused, looping introspection and makes An American Childhood a pleasure, if a forgettable one.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Sohrab Ahmari, who set off a tempest-in-a-teapot on the right with Against David French-ism last year, is in the Spectator with How to be right, explaining what unites the ascendant figures on the right — Attorney General Bill Barr, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Senator Josh Hawley — that I’ve discussed in this section over previous newsletters.
They recognize, first, that corporate America (especially the largest firms that dominate the internet and culture industries) actively supports the left’s social and cultural agenda on everything from policing and gender ideology to abortion and immigration. Whatever the cause — I suspect it has to do with more than just executives following trends — it’s a reality. Woke conservatives see it clearly, because they aren’t blinded by the pro-business dogmas of the past.
. . .
Woke conservatives understand the aim of our political community is to secure the ‘general welfare’ of the whole, as the preamble to the Constitution puts it. Maximizing the freedom of private economic actors can’t possibly be the One Thing Needful to fulfill this constitutional promise in every instance. Especially not when the unrestrained action of private firms ends up perversely destroying Americans’ liberties, as happens with Big Tech censorship.
. . .
Third, and related: woke conservatives see both political opportunity and justice in protecting the working and middle classes. The opportunity lies in the fact that the left’s moral vision, while no doubt sincerely held, fundamentally serves the interests of the liberal classes: journalists and other ‘creatives’, academe, high-end tech workers, HR professionals, the white upper-middle class.
For all its fire and fury, the current liberal ferment invariably ends in demands for diversity, representation and correct language — requirements that corporate America is happy to accommodate and which suit the American bourgeoisie as a new system of manners. Liberal ‘social justice’ does precious little to address the precarious condition of the working class; if anything, liberals exacerbate it through importing foreign labor, which undercuts unskilled wages.
TLDR: it’s a mix of anti-corporatism, an economic shift leftward (backed by Catholic social justice teaching), and a Carl Schmitt-ian ethos of realist politics.
That Carl Schmitt-ian ethos, is described in the London Review of Books article, Who Am I Prepared to Kill? (It’s worth noting that Carl Schmitt was a Nazi jurist and philosopher whose conception of ‘friend and enemy’ politics are increasingly referenced on the left and right):
The outcome of all this is a politics with which Schmitt’s name is commonly associated, one that reduces to a base distinction between ‘friend and enemy’. The distinction itself is what counts, not whatever fuels or justifies it. From Schmitt’s grim perspective, the friend-enemy distinction is ultimately realised in the question: who am I prepared to kill and who am I prepared to die for?
In Ahmari’s words, it comes out as such:
What’s the it conservatives need to get? It is simply this: that the political left neither loves you nor shares many loves with you, certainly not the love of neutral norms and procedures that have long been the stock-in-trade of the center-right establishment.
Partly owing to the shock electoral successes of populism, and partly to liberalism’s own inner logic, the left has now abandoned all the old procedural niceties: in the corridors of power, in the press, in the street, online. To be sure, some ‘moderate’ liberals still mouth the old rhetoric — ‘free speech’, ‘free inquiry’, etc — and get canceled for their trouble. But what their movement as a whole seeks is the brute enactment of substantive liberal commitments.
The left has a crystalline moral vision (moral by its own lights, at any rate). To the liberal mind, norms and procedures are worthwhile only insofar as they help advance this vision. If existing norms and procedures fail to do that, well, new ones will have to be found. The point isn’t to uphold some neutral ground that different groups might contest, with winners and losers periodically switching places. The point is to win. Decisively.
I’ve stated before that I think this populist, anti-corporate, economically-left stance is the future of the Republican party — in that it builds an intellectual framework for a platform that doesn’t reject ‘Trump-ism,’ but embraces and refashions it in pursuit of electoral success long after Donald Trump is gone.