Extremism in Defense of Vice

 It's hard to say in which activity cultural reactionaries take more delight: the persecution of vices they do not routinely practice themselves, or the ferocious defense of the ones they do. It has happened more than once that a right-winger who would vehemently defend the punitive incarceration of anyone selling an ounce of weed will also be the first person to denounce as creeping tyranny the news that New York City, say, just imposed an incremental tax on soda. Generally, they will hold both views without detecting the least contradiction between them, and perhaps there isn't one. So long as one is not troubled by the Categorical Imperative, at least, one can be against the vices of others and passionately in favor of one's own. 

I was thinking about this in reading the arch-Tory George Saintsbury's 1920 work on oenology, Notes on a Cellar-Book. I went to the book expecting a light introduction to the joys of connoisseurship. I was unprepared to find in its pages quite such a blistering polemic against the evils of Prohibitionism. One might think that for a traditionalist and product of the Victorian era like Saintsbury, the question of whether or not to ban alcohol could go either way. But Saintsbury is clear in his own mind: the attempted abolition of booze was an instance of Pecksniffian reformism, intrusive modernism, and—worst of all—a frontal attack on one of his own dearest pleasures. And for the conservative, the creature comforts, even or perhaps especially when they take the form of cherished private vices, will always come first. 

Fixed Slices

 Well, Hungary's ever-repulsive prime minister Viktor Orbán was back in the news this week for the worst possible reasons—this time for making a public statement so scorchingly blatant in its racist ideology that even one of his political allies condemned the remark as "Nazi" rhetoric. One might be tempted to dismiss his comments as the irrelevant prattling of a tinpot tyrant—except that Orbán enjoys a terrifying and growing amount of international clout, including in this country. 

This year's CPAC—the annual event that sets the agenda each year for allegedly "mainstream" movement conservatism in the United States is—lest we forget—scheduled to host Orbán next month as a featured speaker. That is, one of the dominant fora in the U.S. Republican Party and conservative movement is going to provide a star platform to a man who rants about "race-mixing"—a further step in the GOP's increasingly open, no-holds-barred endorsement of outright white nationalist ideology. 

A "Devil" Disclosed

In his Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes begins with a stark warning that the unexampled prosperity of the recent past had left people unprepared for the possibility of real economic catastrophe. He argued that Thomas Malthus, at the dawn of modern political economy, had "disclosed a Devil" lurking below the surface of prosperity—the specter of mass starvation. During the affluence of the late 19th century and the belle époque, Keynes wrote, "the Devil [...] was chained up and out of sight." But with the harsh peace terms imposed on Germany in the wake of the First World War, Keynes argued, "Now perhaps we have loosed him again."

Keynes' invocation of Malthus was unfortunate (though in keeping with his contrarian affection for the oft-maligned cleric). As Alex de Waal has argued in a famous book on famine theory, Malthus' concept of catastrophic famine has little empirical support. It is more an a priori deduction from the (highly questionable) assumptions of his theory than a historical reality. There never really was a truly Malthusian famine, and there probably never will be. 

Generally Accepted Riddling Principles

 In a recent episode of the Omnibus Project podcast, Ken Jennings was introducing the topic of a once-popular early-twentieth century pseudo-riddle—a nonsensical question that took the form of a riddle but in reality had no answer. In order to tee up this subject, he took us on a tour through the history of riddling more generally, from ancient times to the present. Some memorable landmarks on the journey included Samson's riddle in the Bible, by which he confounds the Philistines; the riddle of the Sphinx, in the myth of Oedipus; and—in modern times—the pseudo-Medieval riddles that Gollum poses to Bilbo in The Hobbit. 

Now, running down this roster, one is struck first of all by the ancient-ness and continuity of riddles: they are, as Ken tells us, the oldest known form of human puzzle-making. But one notices something else too, as soon as one inspects more closely any given one of these riddles—and that is their fundamental inadequacy. We have in our heads some notion of what a riddle should be. But every single one of the canonical examples adduced above seems to fall short of the ideal type. We can all sense that there is something just a little bit cheating or eyebrow-raising about all of them. 

Bros-to-Riches: An Examination of the National Myth

The recent crash and burn of the cryptocurrency bubble invites the question: why is our society so distinctly enamored of the pyramid scheme? Why do we keep re-inventing it under different guises? Whether in the form of New Thought and New Age–influenced scams of the classic pyramid variety, Multi-Level Marketing companies of the sort that made the fortune of the DeVos family and ruined those of countless less fortunate Americans, or today's crypto fads—they all hold out the same promise: that wealth can be generated indefinitely based on something other than the underlying use-value of the product you are selling, namely: the other participants in the scheme.

And the thing is: it can work! For a time. Which is why people keep signing up. As long as you find a supply of new marks, the current participants in the scheme can make money. Then, their expanding bank balances become themselves the best enticement for luring in new marks. And the cycle goes on. This, then, is the first answer to the question with which we began. Why do people keep reinventing the pyramid scheme? Because it works. Some people get rich from them, just as some people get rich from slot machines. As long as you are early enough in and early enough to pull out, you personally can make bank, even though the majority will always lose money in the end. 

Easter Eggs 006: Venturi, Brown, Izenour

It is somewhat jarring to find more than one positive reference to Tom Wolfe in Learning from Las Vegas—a collaboration by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour dating from the 1970s. After all, Venturi and his collaborators are the subject of enormous satirical scorn in Wolfe's own architectural criticism, specifically his 1981 From Bauhaus to Our House: a needlessly polemical send-up of modern architecture which—in light of Venturi et al.'s friendly citations to his work a few years earlier—now seems an act of gratuitous ingratitude. And while it's possible that Wolfe's ribbing was understood on all sides as friendly banter, his words about the architects have somewhat too much of the tang of personal ressentiment to be entirely explained away in this manner. 

Helpless Citizens

Throughout my life, when faced with a mechanical difficulty, I have always sought the longest path between two points, inviting the consternation of anyone who enters my orbit. The paradigmatic case came when I was giving my dad a lift somewhere in my car, some time in college. He noticed that the clock on the dashboard was showing the wrong time. "Do you want me to re-set that?" he asked. "Oh don't worry about it," I replied. "You just add on an hour and seventeen minutes to whatever it says there." 

The clock had previously been set correctly, you see. And this once-correct time had merely been obscured beneath the archaeological deposit of a seasonal daylight savings shift and a seventeen-minute battery outage that I had never gotten around to correcting it for. 

Mold as Metaphor

 It stands to reason that the week one decides to sell one's house is the same in which the economy sputters, interest rates rise nationwide—putting borrowing costs out of reach for many would-be buyers—and one discovers all the insidious creeping problems about one's property that one never noticed before. 

As much as one might like to see in all this a cruel jest of providence, however—or a just retribution for having benefitted for so long from artificially inflated housing prices—the correspondence of the last of these occurrences with the decision to sell is not wholly coincidental. After all, it's perhaps not strictly true that I had never noticed the mold growing around my HVAC system before. It's just that, so long as one is not actively trying to sell the place, and mold's presence or absence can only matter to oneself, one settles for convenient fictions at the expense of truth. Only the act of selling makes it necessary to confront what one would rather leave unacknowledged. 

C'est Moi, Encore

I was chatting with a friend the other week: giving him—as I often do—a verbal digest of the Six Foot Turkey posts that have appeared since the last time we spoke. Encapsulating the insights of my May 9 entry, "C'est Moi," I went through the same progression of thought all over again as I had in writing the original piece: I'm worried that the one short and sloppy novel that I wrote at age 27 and that will never be published by a real publisher or find an audience may in fact have been the only novel I have in me and the only one I will ever write because I think I'm discovering I don't have the ability to make up things that haven't actually happened to me, or to write about anyone other than myself, and so all I can really do is transcribe the actual events of my life, but maybe that's not so bad because how many great authors are really doing anything more than that?; weren't all the greatest authors really just writing thinly-disguised autobiography? Like Proust and Joyce and—

My friend cut me off here with a snort. "Wait," he said. "Are those actually the greatest authors? Or did you just hand-select a couple examples that fit your point?" Confirmation bias, in short. 

Speaking Out

 One of the most dearly-cherished myths of my liberal upbringing was that of the ultimate importance of "speaking out." When confronted with the history of twentieth century regimes that degenerated from democracy to autocracy, it was common to ask: why did it happen? And the simple answer always came back: "because people didn't speak out." 

When we read in our history books about the collapse of liberal democratic governments and their replacement with totalitarianism, we often wondered: "why didn't anyone speak out?" I guess we assumed that if anyone had, the terrible event could not have taken place. Pastor Martin Niemöller had said as much: "first they came.... and I did not speak out": the implication being that if he and others had spoken out, it would have made the difference.