Hash Brown Potatoes

 The strangest thing about the J.D. Vance obsession with childless adults—the aspect that won him the monicker "weird" that has lasted so well in this election—is that it seems so arbitrary. He has wormed his way into our private lives in the role of self-appointed judgmental relative. But we are not related to him. He has decreed standards for us that he thinks we ought to live up to. But we have no idea where these standards come from—or who he even is. We are like: "Excuse me; do I know you, sir?" 

There is something Kafkaesque about suddenly being condemned for failing to abide by someone else's arbitrary standards of social conformity—ones that we never agreed to honor in the first place. I was reading Ionesco's absurdist one-act play Jack, or The Submission the other night, and it captures this feeling perfectly. Jack, the central figure of the play, is hounded by relatives for a variety of mysterious and incomprehensible sins. He seems, for unclear reasons, to have let everyone down. 

Alleles/Memes

 I was thinking back today to a post I wrote on this blog years ago. It doesn't matter which one now. The point is just—it reminded me: some of the stuff I write here is actually pretty good. Quite good, even. I'm the equal of Ezra Klein or whoever the writer-hero of the moment may be. All those other diligent bloggers who started out spewing their thoughts into the void somewhere and were, for some reason, plucked from obscurity—I'm just as good as them. So why has the hand of fate not chosen me to be elevated as well? 

It could be that the stuff I write is not actually as good as I think. And indeed, a lot of the stuff on this blog is indefensible. A lot of it is just an excuse to string together quotes from various things I've read. But—don't people see the gems poking through? Can't they see through the accumulated dross? I know some people do. The handful of people who've read the blog at any length have all—at one time or another—found something here that spoke to them. They've read a post that touched them or a sentence that seemed to them to have been phrased just right. I too have penned my contribution to the lip-smacking mot juste. 

The Pity of War

 In his classic essay, "Notes on Nationalism," George Orwell writes that it is a hallmark of the nationalist mindset that one always condemns the atrocities of the other side of a conflict—while managing not even to hear about the atrocities committed by one's own side. 

Crucially, Orwell's concept of nationalism extended far beyond simple jingoistic patriotism or blinkered devotion to one's own country. One can also be a "nationalist," in Orwell's sense, on behalf of an ideology, or of a party to a conflict with whom one feels some other kind of moral affinity. 

Reparations

 The Boston Globe ran a headline the other day that should make anyone in this country queasy. Surveying the financial wherewithal of current members of Congress, the paper found that lawmakers whose ancestors had been slaveholders had a disproportionately higher net worth than those whose did not. 

The finding provides anecdotal but nonetheless unsettling evidence that slavery—more than a century and a half after its end—is still conferring unjust advantages on the people whose ancestors practiced it. The notion undercuts in the most troubling way our default belief in meritocracy.

Hot Mics

 At some point during the early pandemic, after we had all made the transition to living our professional lives on Zoom, the horror stories started pouring in. There were the YouTube videos, say, telling the cautionary tale of a white collar worker who forgot her camera was still on, and who proceeded to use the toilet in the middle of a staff meeting. Not to speak of the notorious Toobin incident. 

Some of the YouTube videos were probably staged. But, whether real or fake, they spoke to a genuine nightmare we all shared—the terror of exposure. The Toobin affair, which was all too real, likewise stuck in our minds because it spoke to our own deepest anxieties. We mocked and ostracized Toobin not because we could not relate to his error—but, to the contrary, because it seemed all too close to us. 

Incomprehensible

 One late night in Somerville, years ago, I turned down all the lights and put on Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. I even managed to finish it, somehow. It was the most excruciatingly boring piece of arthouse cinema I'd ever forced myself to watch, just for the sake of saying I had done so. 

Even once I made it to end, however, the victory felt hollow. I realized that there were few bragging rights to be won simply from having viewed it, start to finish. Anyone could do that. I felt I ought to have been sophisticated enough that have "gotten something out of it" too. But what? 

Let's Not, Please

 A friend of mine with more stamina than I have stayed up for the Hillary Clinton speech on the first night of the DNC. He described a moment—which was also noted by the media—when the crowd started chanting "Lock him up," referring to Donald Trump. Clinton didn't lead the chant or join in (as Trump would have done). But she didn't make a point of hushing the crowd, either. Instead, she gave a strained smile, in my friend's telling, that effectively gave them permission to continue. The press portrayed the moment as her "revenge" on Trump for initiating the "lock her up" chant eight years ago. 

I really hate to see the Democratic Party go the direction of normalizing this sort of thing. I get that it is all part of the current strategy. After choosing to hold the moral high ground for several election cycles, today's Democrats appear to have decided that this simply doesn't work. You have to fight fire with fire. As one party strategist told Politico, Michelle Obama's famous counsel, "When they go low, we go high," has been replaced in effect with a new dictum: "When they go low, we go with the flow." In other words, Democrats have chosen to echo Republicans' appeals to the lowest common denominator. 

An Army of Mercenaries

 As the Ukraine-Russia war took another fatal turn this week—with Ukraine now occupying a piece of Russian territory—I found myself thinking back to the short-lived moment, roughly a year ago, when we thought this conflict might actually be about to end. It was at that point that Putin's one-time stooge, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led a short-lived mutiny that looked for a day or two like it might actually result in a full-scale coup. 

Of course, even if Prigozhin had succeeded in removing Putin from power, that would be no guarantee he would end the war. As the leader of the vile mercenary force, the Wagner Group, Prigozhin was no humanitarian or friend to Ukraine. Still, his willingness to oppose Putin, when no one else dared, made him seem a suddenly more interesting figure. And his horrific murder, a few months later (we're coming up this week on the one-year anniversary of his death), granted him a tragic luster. 

Errata and Marginalia 027: Tuten

 Frederic Tuten, Tintin in the New World (New York, NY, William Morrow and Company, 1993).

The novel may come across at first as another too-cute postmodern experiment. It has all the earmarks of its genre: high and low culture mixed together, a pastiche of literary styles, a framing device drawn from pop culture that is used to explore highbrow themes (similar to Robert Coover's fabulist technique in a book like, say, A Political Fable)—all interlarded with a sense of irony. 

In a world that has been taken over by postmodernism, much of this seems less interesting now than it did in the '70s-'90s. After all, we are all postmodernists now. Default educated opinion is culturally omnivorous, and no longer finds it shocking to juxtapose a children's cartoon with characters from Thomas Mann. We all unthinkingly engage in the same kind of bricolage each day. 

The Bends, Revisited

 After my regrettable COVID diagnosis earlier this week, I decided on the spur of the moment to re-engineer my week's travel plans. I had originally intended to fly home yesterday. But, as the day approached, and I still felt awful, I decided I should spare myself that experience (and the world my germs). I therefore rearranged my flight reservation so that I'd fly home a week later. 

This meant I suddenly had an extra week to myself at my family's place in Wyoming. I genuinely believed—as I say—that I would need this time to recuperate. But I won't deny that I was also sort of looking forward to it. I would suddenly have far more space to myself than I usually have at home. And, by coincidence, I had something in my schedule I had not had in year: a genuinely free week. 

Don't Tread on My Gemeinschaft

 I just finished reading Sándor Márai's classic novel Embers this week. I will say nothing of the book's suspenseful plot—which mostly unfolds in the form of a reminiscence, over the course of a single long conversation that fills the book's final two-thirds. What I most wanted to reflect on was the nature of the author's famous nostalgia for the world he depicts. The book is set in the time it was written—the 1940s, in the midst of the second world war—but it is told largely through the memories of a man who belongs to an earlier time. The aged general at the center of the story is a product of the pre-war world: the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the period before either of the twentieth century's two global conflagrations. 

When we look for the reasons why Márai's protagonist recalls this epoch as such an idyll, we discover that it is largely because he sees it as a Gemeinschaft—the sort of community governed by disinterested ideals and "natural will," in the terminology of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies—that precedes the modern society or "Gesellschaft" that is governed through relations of mutual self-interest (what Tönnies calls the "rational will"). Márai's depiction of the loyal servant Nini and her relationship to the old general seems straight from the pages of Tönnies, for instance. 

Once Lost Always Lost?

 Well, it's finally happened. After four and a half years of a global pandemic, I've just had my first positive COVID test. As soon as I poured in the sample dropper, the "test" line turned red. I sat there patiently for fifteen minutes hoping it would go away. But it did not... Oh well; it could be worse. So far, it's been a fairly mild case. Two days in and with a waning fever, I'm probably already past the worst of it. I've been vaccinated and boosted twice or thricely. So the odds are in my favor that this will not be an especially severe illness. 

The worst of it, then, is not so much the symptoms—but simply the fact of having gotten infected. I have had to part with a certain foolish pride. There was some part of me that liked the sense that I had lasted all this time without succumbing. I knew rationally, of course, that my lack of infection did not mean I was smarter or more careful than other people. There is an incurable element of randomness to this and every pandemic. But, secretly, I still felt a certain snooty self-complacency in having made it through the whole crisis COVID-free. 

Neoliberals

 Recently, Freddie deBoer wrote a piece reviving the dispute between Matt Yglesias–style "neoliberals" and the Old Left position on social policy. It's an argument that has been happening in roughly the same form (and even between the same bloggers) since I was in college more than ten years ago. As deBoer summarizes the "neoliberal" position (used in a very specific sense here—not to be conflated with economic "neoliberalism" writ large, necessarily, though it has features in common with it), it essentially holds that the political left should pursue a pro-growth economic strategy—even if it means making common cause with Republicans in backing deregulation and gutting organized labor. Then—after this growth has taken place—the left should focus on redistributing the proceeds. It is at this second stage—the "redistribution" as opposed to "production" stage—that progressive social policy can finally kick into gear. 

I don't know if Matt Yglesias would accept this characterization of his position. But even if he is an imperfect avatar of this "neoliberal" ideology, it certainly exists out there. Obama administration officials back in the day used to talk about "expanding the pie." The idea was essentially the same as the one deBoer characterizes as the neoliberal position: they were saying that the Democratic Party needs to embrace many of the same policies as the Republicans—deregulation, a de-unionized workforce—for the sake of rapid growth; because once the "pie" of economic prosperity is large enough, there can then be a bigger slice available for everyone, after it has been partially redistributed through generous social programs. 

The Wrong Kind of Pity

 I was trying to explain to my parents the other day exactly what it is I find so distasteful about legal practice. They were quizzing me on a number of potential legal careers that I might once have entertained—trying to uncover why I had soured on them. The best I could do was to tell them that every form of legal practice I had yet encountered—including the reputedly more "idealistic" ones, such as civil rights law or environmental law—still involve winners and losers. You are therefore almost always making someone else's life on the other side significantly worse. 

Even if the person you are suing is the scum of the Earth, therefore—even if they are Rudy Giuliani, say—you nonetheless have to be the sort of person who is comfortable with ruining someone's life. You have to believe that Rudy Giuliani is so utterly without redeeming value that you do not mind financially destroying a human being. And you not only need to believe that about Rudy Giuliani—you also have to believe it about a large enough group of adversaries that you can find enough of them to sue to last you for the course of an entire legal career. 

Size Matters

 Trump continued to express his idiosyncratic obsession with crowd sizes today. After disputing for days whether the number of attendees at Harris's political rallies was really as large as she claimed, he has now upped the ante. After the media shared videos of the large groups at Harris events, Trump baselessly asserted that the Harris campaign must have doctored this photographic evidence with AI—in order to make the crowds look bigger than they were. 

This has been a long-standing obsession on Trump's part. As longtime observers of his political career will recall, it was a dispute over crowd sizes that led to the coining of the phrase "alternative facts," which has played such a large role in defining the post-truth era of American politics that Trump created. And it was in part his fondness for crowd events that fueled Trump's paranoid opposition to COVID-era restrictions on mass gatherings. 

In Praise of the Hananiahs

 The New York Times ran a fascinating interview with Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma yesterday. In the course of the discussion, Lankford made clear in a thousand ways that—despite being a Republican—he is not Donald Trump. He held Trump responsible for tanking the bipartisan border deal that Lankford negotiated earlier this year. He acknowledged that the only reason Trump opposed the legislation is that he was worried it might actually solve a problem, in the eyes of the public, and would thereby hand Democrats a victory in an election year. In other words, the bill died for reasons of rank politics, rather than sound policy. (Meanwhile, I too oppose the bill—but not for reasons that matter to either political party at this point. I am still quaint enough to believe in asylum; that was my problem with it.)

Lankford also acknowledged that Trump does and says things we would never do himself. Lankford said that he supports in principle the idea of asylum—i.e., that the United States should be a place of refuge for the oppressed. "There are people that are asylees that are fleeing from injustice around the world," he said, adding: "We don’t want to ever lose [that] in America[.]" When asked about Trump's stated ambition to carry out "mass deportations" of all undocumented people in the country, Lankford made no attempt to defend this policy goal. Instead, he observed that Trump would almost certainly never be able to pull it off in practice. He would start by deporting people with pending orders of removal; but if he tried to circumvent due process for everyone else, "[a] court would stop that immediately."

Ignoble Lies

 It's no surprise that J.D. Vance has launched his opening salvo in the VP wars with a completely misleading and dishonest attack on his counterpart on the rival ticket. After all, dishonesty is baked into his chosen ideology. 

A friend of mine with more contacts in Silicon Valley circles than I have was giving me the low-down the other day on the key intellectual influences (if that's the term) on the Peter Thiel tech-fascist circles to which Vance belongs. It appears they have primarily modeled themselves on the Nazi theoretician Carl Schmitt (whose reputation, it must be said, the illiberal academic postmodern leftists have also revived—so we can't exclusively blame the conservatives for this one) and on the political philosopher and Plato scholar Leo Strauss. Or rather, on Leo Strauss as interpreted through various right-wing neo-monarchist bloggers, which may have very little to do with the actual Leo Strauss—I haven't read enough of his work to say. 

The Mask of Civilization

 Seeing the images of the race riots that broke out across the UK last week, it's hard not to agree with the poet John Berryman's dire assessment: "culture was only a phase/ through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/ to the true light again of savagery." In the sight of the balaclava-clad mobs hurling bricks at mosques and trying to set fire to hotels full of people—because they reportedly housed asylum-seekers—we have the type and image of every torch-and-pitchfork-bearing mob throughout history, hunting for witches to burn. We see that the same patterns of communal violence repeat themselves at the slightest pretext, in every society. In short, we find that the mask of civilization rests ever so lightly on the face—and is in perpetual danger of slipping off. 

It is tempting, when confronted with this spectacle, to cite theorists of crowd psychology to explain it. Elias Canetti and Gustave Le Bon both wrote that one of the default ur-forms of the mob is the pack organized for hunting. The ginned-up mob searching for an outsider to lynch is—sadly—one of the oldest and most frequently-recurring features of history. But what makes the UK riots fit so well into the familiar patterns of communal violence is that they were sparked by reports of a crime. This, indeed, is the script of every major wave of ethnic violence or pogroms. Hindu persecution of Muslim minorities in Gujarat; Kyrgyz pogroms against Uzbek minorities; Rakhine violence against the Rohingya in Burma; the anti-Black Tulsa riots in the U.S.—they all followed this pattern. 

Berkeley's God

 The more I read George Berkeley, the more it seems to me we might have skipped all the rest of modern philosophy and just left it with him. Here, after all—at the dawn of modern philosophy—we find already disclosed the key insights of the Kantian and the logical positivist systems alike. 

Indeed, Berkeley was perhaps one step ahead of Kant. The latter's great "Copernican Revolution" was to discover that the whole structure of reality and its apparent laws of uniformity could be rescued from skepticism, if it be recast simply as a structure of the mind—belonging to the realm of phenomena. 

Whitehead

 Was Whitehead simply a crank? Surely not. There are long sections in his lecture series, Science and the Modern World, in which he proves that he can write clearly when he wants to. He demonstrates that he is more than capable of articulating a coherent thought if he chooses. To be sure, these passages tend to appear when he is explaining some philosophical problem. When he is setting up the difficulty for us, he makes it all perfectly lucid. But then, when it comes time to reveal the solution, he suddenly becomes downright Delphic in his inscrutability. 

In the course of the lectures, after all, Whitehead addresses most of the familiar problems of modern philosophy. He points to Hume's problem of induction, for instance. He observes that it is rather odd that, at the very dawn of modern science, Hume managed to refute the very premises on which inductive science is based. He says that it is perhaps ironic that modern scientists have all embraced Hume's philosophy—and admit his objections to the philosophical foundations of empirical inquiry to be unanswerable—and yet have proceeded on their way as if these objections did not exist. 

J.D. Vance in the Gesellschaft

 The New York Times ran a follow-up report earlier this week on the "childless Americans" story. In this piece, they confronted even more directly the social conservative argument I was worrying about last week. As you may recall, I wrote at the time that conservatives like Vance would almost certainly interpret the decision of many American young adults to pass on raising children as a "selfish" choice. 

And indeed, the follow-up article from the Times cites several conservative commentators making exactly this claim. The article quotes one Fox News host, for instance, as saying that young people are choosing not to reproduce because "They just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace [sic] of fulfillment[.]"

YgUDuh

 We have entered the season of general election pandering in earnest now; and so, we are treated to the sight of Democrats falling over themselves to out-Republican the Republicans on crime and the border. We see Harris burnishing her credentials as a prosecutor; Harris reaffirming that she will keep Biden's anti-asylum order in place; Harris claiming—with one eye on Pennsylvania—that she always supported fracking. And we also, for some reason, all have to pay obeisance to the idea that we hate Nippon Steel. 

Now the Democratic governor of must-win swing-state Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, is also weighing in on this subject. The New York Times reports that he is the latest Democratic leader to go public with his opposition to the acquisition of U.S. Steel by a Japanese company. It's easy to see the political calculus behind his stance. What's harder to understand is exactly why the deal is supposed to be bad. No one has yet pointed to any concerns about Nippon Steel's management or its commitment to U.S. workers.