Projection

In his critical and philosophical work about fellow writer Jean Genet, Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre tells an anecdote about meeting a friend after the second world war from whom he had been long parted. While they were delighted to see each other at first, Sartre relates, they subsequently fell out over politics. This led to some heated exchanges, in the course of which his friend would slip into a repeated linguistic error. The third time this happened, claims Sartre, "he looked at me irritably and asked [...] 'Why do you keep making that exasperating mistake?'" (Frechtman trans.)

Sartre uses the story to illustrate the concept of "projection." That is, when a person discovers something in themselves that they are not willing to tolerate—some socially-unacceptable impulse, temptation, or plan—they turn around and attribute it to the other. "You are the one doing that, not me!" Hence the need of righteous society for scapegoats—outcasts and the underclass—to whom they can attribute their own worst impulses; hence the tendency for political adversaries to accuse one another of doing what they are plotting themselves, and using this as an excuse to preempt the other—and so on. 

Angsttraum

 One of the classic dream-types is the anxiety dream (I have no idea if Angsttraum is something they talk about in psychoanalysis, but it should be)—often intruding during that half hour or so of fitful light sleep that one catches after waking up slightly earlier than one's first scheduled obligation of the day, and drifting off again while knowing that an alarm is about to summon you to renewed effort and that there is not time left to fall back into a really deep sleep. 

For years, the most common setting for my anxiety dreams was the temporary stage that would be set up each year in my high school gymnasium for the all-school musical. No matter how old I got—how much chronological and physical distance I placed between myself and my teenage years—in a moment of high-anxiety snoozing I am always transported back to that gym; it's the night before the play; and I realize that I have procrastinated for too long the one key task of actually learning my lines. 

Singularity

 A friend and I have a running debate about just how worried we should be about the potential emergence of a "singularity"—i.e. a hypothetical technological intelligence possessing infinite powers. He thinks it's a real concern that stands a chance of overwhelming and subverting human civilization—if not the entire fabric of the multiverse—within the next few decades. 

Why? The thinking goes: machine learning and artificial intelligence are already showing enormous gains in sophistication. As machines manage to teach themselves how to do more and more things, they will eventually figure out how to augment their own intelligence and capacity. This would create an infinite feedback-loop in which machines become exponentially more knowledgeable, hence infinitely powerful. 

Not a sparrow falls...

 In my not-very-consistent attempt to keep up with each week's environmental news as part of my job, I came across an article describing what seemed an unlikely animal experiment. The scientists were attempting to measure the effects of fear—separated out from real physical danger—on a group of song sparrows. The control group was left alone to live their usual sparrow lives. The experimental group, by contrast, was subjected to a constant pulse of terrifying sounds associated with the birds' natural predators. 

Now, the ethics of animal testing are complicated and I'm not sure I have a thought-out position. In any event, there are far more questionable forms of testing out there than this experiment—ones that cause direct physical damage rather than psychological (and only indirectly physical) harm to their animal subjects. And none of that is even to mention the animal cruelty that takes place on an even vaster scale in the factory farms, fisheries, and slaughterhouses of the world. 

Takes

 We live in the age of takes—so much so that a person like Matt Yglesias—noted author of many a bad take on Twitter—can refer to himself and his colleagues as working within the "take space"; the implication being that takes are a kind of consumer product, and that the maker of takes is an expert craftsperson of our era—someone with the unerring hand and eye for publishing takes of just the right size and shape to win widespread acclaim. 

What is the secret recipe? What distinguishes a good take from a bad one? The first ingredient is obvious: a good take is one that people in its implied target audience will like. It therefore must be one they agree with. Not only that, it must be one they agreed with even before they read it. It can't, that is to say, set out to persuade anyone of anything; the scrolling brain rebels against such bullying—it must, on the contrary, flatter its readers' prejudices.

Pyrrha

 In his collection of philosophical parables and riddles, each centering on a hypothetical imagined city, Italo Calvino describes one metropolis that his narrator—Marco Polo; who is and is not the historical thirteenth-century Venetian merchant and traveler—visits after hearing of it only by name, Pyrrha. The city, the narrator reflects, is one he long pondered in thought before ever glimpsing it in fact. Having thought of it for so long, he conjured a version of it in his mind that came to have its own reality, and which he knew as the only Pyrrha. 

When the day arrived that he finally visited this Pyrrha and saw it with his own eyes, the invisible version of it that had existed in his mind was forced to cede the name. The imagined city could not be Pyrrha, since the real one was in front of him, and was plainly quite different; and it had already taken that name. Yet, the narrator cannot quite rid himself of the ghost of the imagined city. It still seems to have its own existence. Yet, if the real Pyrrha is before him, then what is the imagined city of his mind? The other city still exists, he declares, "but I could no longer call it by a name[.]" (Weaver trans.)

Errata and Marginalia 020: Pelevin

Victor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens (New York, Penguin Books: 2002); originally published 1999.

There are few things in this world as eerie as seeing satire come to life. There was the 2014 episode of This American Life, for example, which made a joke about a hypothetical dystopian future in which the president of the United States had become none other than the crass real estate dealer and reality TV personality Donald Trump. But it's not only in the United States where apparently sardonic and unserious remixes of our cultural detritus can turn out to be prophetic. Reading Russian author Victor Pelevin's novel Homo Zapiens (to give its title in the U.S. release), one has the sense that he foretold the entirety of the Putin era before it had even begun. 

To fully appreciate the extent to which this is true, it is perhaps necessary to read Pelevin's novel shortly after encountering Peter Pomerantsev's 2014 book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible—a journalistic account of his time making TV documentaries in Russia during the early Putin era, as the scope for genuinely independent media and civil society was steadily closing. I listened to Pomerantsev's book on a recent road trip. This weekend, I read Pelevin's novel in paperback. And what became frighteningly clear as I did so is that what Pelevin wrote as fiction in 1998—the tail end of the Yeltsin era—could be written as fact by the time Pomerantsev was publishing his book just 16 years later.