Podcast Peregrinations 01

I catch a fair number of podcasts in the course of a week, although almost no crazy-making, infuriating, traditional news (unless embedded in a podcast). Whether long-form or short-, podcasts fuel and sate my curiosity just fine without my giving too much attention to straightforward propaganda and thought control, which seems to be the aim of corporate media. There is no tag at the bottom of the page for quick hits or hot takes on topics for which I don’t want to write full posts, and periodic tab dumps lack appeal and timeliness. Instead, a handful of relatively succinct ideas will appear under this title so that I can describe what crosses my path and provide modest commentary. No links provided.

The first item comes from a lightly moderated debate between Robert Sapolsky and Daniel Dennett on the question of free will (i.e., do we have it?). Sapolsky takes the materialist/determinist view that free will is an illusion, whereas Dennett believes free will exists at various levels of strength throughout life. This question tires me quickly because it doesn’t lead anywhere; whether free will be an integral part of cognition or illusory doesn’t affect or change how individuals go through life. It’s a purely academic question that doesn’t really demand an answer, though considerable time is wasted contemplating the question and confusing people. The crux of Sapolsky’s argument is basic scientific reductionism. If an action or decision (e.g., will the next fork of food be peas or potatoes? to use a banal example) is predicated on a cause, Sapolsky insists on inquiry into the cause of the cause of the cause, etc. until a root cause is found. That’s an obvious infinite regress and blind alley, a rhetorical trick deployed simply by posing the question. By analogy, Sapolsky would seek the origin of a flowing river in upstream confluences, then headwaters, then elevated runoff of rain or melt water, then rain, snow pack, or glacier before arriving at the hydrological cycle. It’s exhausting and pointless.

In contrast, Dennett has no requirement that what’s clearly a process or flow be subordinated to a materialist search for root cause(s). (Dennett similarly obviates the need for an inner viewer of consciousness in the so-called Cartesian theater a/k/a the ghost in the machine that puzzles other philosophers.) Why try to capture the wind? Dennett instead describes free will as a skill or competency one gains through maturation. Age-related readiness thresholds are customary before individuals can be trusted with certain types of decision making. So don’t hand a loaded gun to a 5-year-old, who does not yet understand the concept of death and will most likely treat the weapon like a toy. Several thresholds are bunched at the end of adolescence as minors reach their majority. At the end of life, if the mind deteriorates, free will typically ebbs with it. The notion of free will is also central to society being bound by a set of laws, which requires punishment and removal not of free will but civil freedom and personal choice. That’s what incarceration accomplishes after severe infractions. Dennett’s view is far more sensible and has the distinct advantage of already being instantiated in culture.

Offered Without Comment 21

Another from Hari Kunzru’s “Easy Chair” column, this time the July 2022 issue of Harper’s Magazine:

We might hear in [Thomas] Nagel’s cosmic detachment an echo of anatta — the Buddhist doctrine that there is no essence or soul grounding human existence. For Buddhists, the clear light of reality is visible only to those who abandon the illusion of selfhood. Objectivity, in the way non-Buddhists usually think about it, doesn’t erase the self, even if it involves a flight from individuality. It actually seems to make the self more powerful, more authoritative. The capacity to be objective is seen as something to strive for, an overcoming of the cognitive biases that smear or smudge the single window and impart our ability to see the world “as it really is.” Objectivity is earned through rigor and discipline. It is selfhood augmented.

anattā

Hyperanalysis, Intervention, and Micromanagement

A bunch of unrelated things I have been reading and hearing suddenly and rather unexpectedly came together synthetically. The profusion is too great to provide a handy set of links, and backstage analytics indicate that almost no one follows the links I provide anyway, so this will be free form.

Hyperanalysis

As I have previously blogged, peering (or staring) too intently at a physical object or subject of inquiry tends to result in the object or subject being examined at the wrong resolution. An obtuse way of restating this is that one can’t study the cosmos under a microscope or cell biology through a telescope. The common mistake is to study minutia and fail to perceive the whole, rarely the reverse. Iain McGilchrist suggests that hyperanalysis is a hallmark of an imbalance in brain lateralization, where the left brain (the Emissary) takes primacy over the right brain (the Master). Others building on McGilchrist’s thesis have theorized that human culture and styles of cognition have swung in and out of proper balance periodically throughout history. One theory used portraiture to support how depiction of the human face can be either humanistic or clinical in orientation. What artists perceive then produce divergent aesthetics where the eyes and mouth in particular suggest different ways of encountering the world. Using art to develop theories of psychohistory fits well with one of the preoccupations of this blog, namely, the nature of consciousness.

Intervention

Armed with a precise appreciation of some small aspect of a whole, often abstracted and idealized independently from easily observed fact in actuality, some make the leap that human activity can be acted upon confidently with entirely foreseeable outcomes. Thus, incautious decision-makers intervene to correct, adjust, or game areas within their concern and control. The applicable aphorism that restrains cautious people is “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Perhaps the Dunning-Kruger Effect helps to explain (at least in part) why actors plunge forward despite ample evidence that outcomes don’t adhere reliably to planning. Indeed, the rise and fall of many institutions demonstrate the fallibility of interventions in dynamic systems. Just ask the Federal Reserve. Periodic recourse to warfare is also characterized as a breakdown of peaceful stratagems accompanied by a fog where clarity of purpose is lost. Faced with deteriorating conditions, the demand that something be done, not nothing, also testifies to human frailty and frequent refusal to accept unknown contingency or inevitability.

Micromanagement

When ideology truly misfires, strenuous interventions take the form of tyranny in an attempt to force resistant outcomes into predetermined channels. Too many awful examples of abject failure on that account to mention. Small-scale tyranny might be better recognized as micromanagement. Control freaks adopt that behavior out of any number of motivations, such as distrust of others’ competence, inability to delegate or share responsibility, and hero syndrome. Ironically, the targets of control are often petty and do not contribute meaningfully to enhanced behavior or function. Rather, they focus on a subsidiary metric as a proxy for overall health, wellbeing, and effectiveness.

As people encounter ideologies and learn to systematize, they are especially prone to using incomplete understandings of complex systems and then seizing upon one intervention or another to attempt to solve problems. This is not limited to students in the early years of college who discover a supposed Rosetta stone for fixing ills but rather includes any reform political candidate or newly minted CEO with a mandate to remove corruption, dead weight, or inefficiency. This is also the domain of specialists, experts, and academics who have concentrated their efforts in a narrow subfield and feel confident generalizing that acquired skill and applied knowledge outside the area of focus. Of course, it’s warranted to rely on brain surgeons for brain surgery and car mechanics for automotive repairs. But no one expects them to offer advice on intractable social problems, correct historical wrongs, or develop a centered philosophy of anything. Indeed, institutions and societies are so complex and inherently unsteerable that, despite many futile attempts, no one has ever developed a comprehensive understanding sufficient to engineer programs that lead anywhere remotely in the vicinity of utopia. Yet with an abundance of confidence, agitators and activists — sometime quite young but unafraid to instruct their elders — seek to implement their ideological designs, by force if necessary, to enact desired change. Maybe those changes are considered humble baby steps toward improved social justice and greater equity, tinkering around the edges perhaps, but I doubt most ambitions are so constrained. While that energy is absolutely necessary in a pluralistic society to avoid cynicism and stagnation, it often becomes a victim of its own success when radicals gain power and impose orthodoxies that are ultimately self-defeating and thus short lived. History is full of movements, civil wars, and revolutions that demonstrate the point. Dystopian fiction also forewarns how tyrannies develop out of misguided application of ideology and power.

I probably haven’t described any too well the power law that coalesced in my thinking. Nor do I pretend to have solutions for anything. As I’ve often written, given the myriad problems global civilization now faces, it’s well nigh impossible to know what to wish for with much clarity since deliverance from one set of problems often exacerbates others. World systems theorists try to piece together various dynamics into a coherent unified theory, and I admire the effort to understand how the world really works, but I still subscribe to the precautionary principle when it comes to implementing globe-spanning programs.

Individual vs. Society, pt. 4

Search the tag Counter-Enlightenment at the footer of this blog to find roughly ten disparate blog posts, all circling around the idea that intellectual history, despite all the obvious goodies trucked in with science and technology, is turning decidedly away from long-established Enlightenment values. A fair number of resources are available online and in book form exploring various movements against the Enlightenment over the past few centuries, none of which I have consulted. Instead, I picked up Daniel Schwindt’s The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought (2016), which was gifted to me. The book was otherwise unlikely to attract my attention considering that Schwindt takes Catholicism as a starting point whereas I’m an avowed atheist, though with no particular desire to proselytize or attempt to convince others of anything. However, The Case Against is suffused with curious ideas, so it is a good subject for a new book blogging project, which in characteristic fashion (for me) will likely proceed in fits and starts.

Two interrelated ideas Schwindt puts forward early in the book fit with multiple themes of this blog, namely, (1) the discovery and/or development of the self (I refer more regularly to consciousness) and (2) the reductive compartmentalization of thought and behavior. Let’s take them in order. Here’s a capsule of the first issue:

Plausible Reality

Let me first restate axioms developed in previous blog posts. Narrative is the essential outward form of consciousness. Cognition has many preverbal and nonverbal subtleties, but the exchange of ideas occurs predominantly through narrative, and the story of self (told to oneself) can be understood as stream of consciousness: ongoing self-narration of sensations and events. The principal characteristic of narrative, at least that which is not pure fantasy, is in-the-moment sufficiency. Snap-judgment heuristics are merely temporary placeholders until, ideally at least, thoughtful reconsideration and revision that take time and discernment can be brought to bear. Stories we tell and are told, however, often do not reflect reality well, partly because our perceptual apparatuses are flawed, partly because individuals are untrained and unskilled in critical thinking (or overtrained and distorted), and partly because stories are polluted with emotions that make clear assessments impossible (to say nothing of malefactors with agendas). Some of us struggle to remove confabulation from narrative (as best we can) whereas others embrace it because it’s emotionally gratifying.

A good example of the reality principle is recognition, similar to the 1970s energy crisis, that energy supplies don’t magically appear by simply digging and drilling more of the stuff out of the ground. Those easy-to-get resources have been plundered already. The term peak oil refers to eventual decline in energy production (harvesting, really) when the easy stuff is more than half gone and undiminished (read: increasing) demand impels energy companies to go in search of more exotic supply (e.g., underwater or embedded in shale). If that reality is dissatisfying, a host of dreamt-up stories offer us deliverance from inevitable decline and reduction of lifestyle prerogatives by positing extravagant resources in renewables, hydrogen fuel cells, fusion (not to be confused with fission), or as-yet unexploited regions such as The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. None of these represent plausible realities (except going into heretofore protected regions and bringing ecological devastation).

The relationship of fictional stories to reality is quite complex. For this blog post, a radically narrow description is that fiction is the imaginary space whereas ideas can be tried out and explored safely in preparation for implementation in reality. Science fiction (i.e., imagining interstellar space travel despite its flat impossibility in Newtonian physics) is a good example. Some believe humans can eventually accomplish what’s depicted in sci-fi, and in certain limited examples we already have. But many sci-fi stories simply don’t present a plausible reality. Taken as vicarious entertainment, they’re AOK superfine with me. But given that Western cultures (I can’t opine on cultures outside the West) have veered dangerously into rank ideation and believing their own hype, too many people believe fervently in aspirational futures that have no hope of ever instantiating. Just like giant pools of oil hidden under the Rocky Mountains (to cite something sent to me just today offering illusory relief from skyrocketing gasoline prices).

Among the many genres of narrative now on offer in fiction, no better example of sought-after-power is the superhero story. Identifying with the technological and financial power of Ironman and Batman or the god-powers of Thor and Wonder Woman is thrilling, perhaps, but again, these are not plausible realities. Yet these superrich, superstrong, superintelligent superheros are everywhere in fiction, attesting to liminal awareness of lack of power and indeed frailty. Many superhero stories are couched as coming-of-age stories for girls, who with grit and determination can fight toe-to-toe with any man and dominate. (Too many BS examples to cite.) Helps, of course, if the girl has magic at her disposal. Gawd, do I tire of these stories, told as origins in suffering, acquisition of skills, and coming into one’s own with the mature ability to force one’s will on others, often in the form of straight-up killing and assassination. Judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one but entirely acceptable vigilantism if done wearing a supersuit and claiming spurious, self-appointed moral authority.

There are better narratives that don’t conflate power with force or lack plausibility in the world we actually inhabit. In a rather complicated article by Adam Tooze entitled “John Mearsheimer and the Dark Origins of Realism” at The New Statesman, after a lengthy historical and geopolitical analysis of competing narratives, a mode of apprehending reality is described:

… adopting a realistic approach towards the world does not consist in always reaching for a well-worn toolkit of timeless verities, nor does it consist in affecting a hard-boiled attitude so as to inoculate oneself forever against liberal enthusiasm. Realism, taken seriously, entails a never-ending cognitive and emotional challenge. It involves a minute-by-minute struggle to understand a complex and constantly evolving world, in which we are ourselves immersed, a world that we can, to a degree, influence and change, but which constantly challenges our categories and the definitions of our interests. And in that struggle for realism – the never-ending task of sensibly defining interests and pursuing them as best we can – to resort to war, by any side, should be acknowledged for what it is. It should not be normalised as the logical and obvious reaction to given circumstances, but recognised as a radical and perilous act, fraught with moral consequences. Any thinker or politician too callous or shallow to face that stark reality, should be judged accordingly.

The Power of Naming

For more than a decade, I’ve had in the back of my mind a blog post called “The Power of Naming” to remark that bestowing a name gives something power, substance, and in a sense, reality. That post never really came together, but its inverse did. Anyway, here’s a renewed attempt.

The period of language acquisition in early childhood is suffused with learning the names of things, most of which is passive. Names of animals (associated closely with sounds they make) are often a special focus using picture books. The kitty, doggie, and horsie eventually become the cat, dog, and horse. Similarly, the moo-cow and the tweety-bird shorten to cow and bird (though songbird may be an acceptable holdover). Words in the abstract are signifiers of the actual things, aided by the text symbols learned in literate cultures to reinforce mere categories instead of examples grounded in reality. Multiply the names of things several hundred thousand times into adulthood and indeed throughout life and one can develop a formidable vocabulary supporting expressive and nuanced thought and speech. Do you know the differences between acute, right, obtuse, straight, and reflex angles? Does it matter? Does your knowledge of barware inform when to use a flute, coupe, snifter, shot (or shooter or caballito), nosing glass (or Glencairn), tumbler, tankard, goblet, sling, and Stein? I’d say you’ve missed something by never having drunk dark beer (Ger.: Schwarzbier) from a frosted schooner. All these varieties developed for reasons that remain invisible to someone content to drink everything from the venerable red Solo cup. Funnily enough, the red Solo cup now comes in different versions, fooling precisely no one.

Returning to book blogging, Walter Ong (in Orality and Literacy) has curious comparisons between primarily oral cultures and literate cultures. For example:

Oral people commonly think of names (one kind of words) as conveying power over things. Explanations of Adam’s naming of the animals in Genesis 2:20 usually call condescending attention to this presumably quaint archaic belief. Such a belief is in fact far less quaint than it seems to unreflective chirographic and typographic folk. First of all, names do give humans beings power over what they name: without learning a vast store of names, one is simply powerless to understand, for example, chemistry and to practice chemical engineering. And so with all other intellectual knowledge. Secondly, chirographic and typographic folk tend to think of names as labels, written or printed tags imaginatively affixed to an object named. Oral folk have no sense of a name as a tag, for they have no idea of a name as something that can be seen. Written or printed representations of words can be labels; real, spoken words cannot be. [p. 33]

This gets at something that has been developing over the past few decades, namely, that as otherwise literate (or functionally literate) people gather more and more information through electronic media (screens that serve broadcast and cable TV, YouTube videos, prerecorded news for streaming, and podcasts, and most importantly, audiobooks — all of which speak content to listeners), the spoken word (re)gains primacy and the printed word fades into disuse. Electronic media may produce a hybrid of orality/literacy, but words are no longer silent, internal, and abstract. Indeed, words — all by themselves — are understood as being capable of violence. Gone are the days when “stick and stones ….” Now, fighting words incite and insults sting again.

Not so long ago, it was possible to provoke a duel with an insult or gesture, such as a glove across the face. Among some people, defense of honor never really disappeared (though dueling did). History has taken a strange turn, however. Proposed legislation to criminalize deadnaming (presumably to protect a small but growing number of transgender and nonbinary people who have redefined their gender identity and accordingly adopted different names) recognizes the violence of words but then tries to transmute the offense into an abstract criminal law. It’s deeply mixed up, and I don’t have the patience to sort it out.

More to say in later blog posts, but I’ll raise the Counter-Enlightenment once more to say that the nature of modern consciousness if shifting somewhat radically in response to stimuli and pressures that grew out of an information environment, roughly 70 years old now but transformed even more fundamentally in the last 25 years, that is substantially discontinuous from centuries-old traditions. Those traditions displaced even older traditions inherited from antiquity. Such is the way of the world, I suppose, and with the benefit of Walter Ong’s insights, my appreciation of the outlines is taking better shape.

All Grown Up

Happy to report that humans have finally outgrown their adolescent fixation, obsession, and infatuation surrounding technology and gadgetry, especially those that blow up things (and people), part of a maladaptive desire to watch the world burn (like a disturbed 14-year-old playing with fire to test the boundaries of control while hoping for the boundary to be breached). We are now in the process of correcting priorities and fixing the damage done. We’re also free from the psychological prison in which we trapped ourselves through status seeking and insistence on rigid ego consciousness by recognizing instead that, as artifacts of a hypersocial species, human cognition is fundamentally distributed among us as each of us is for all intents and purposes a storyteller retelling, reinforcing, and embellishing stories told elsewhere — even though it’s not quite accurate to call it mass mind or collective consciousness — and that indeed all men are brothers (an admitted anachronism, since that phrase encompasses women/sisters, too). More broadly, humans also now understand that we are only one species among many (a relative late-comer in evolutionary time, as it happens) that coexist in a dynamic balance with each other and with the larger entity some call Mother Earth or Gaia. Accordingly, we have determined that our relationship can no longer be that of abuser (us) and abused (everything not us) if the dynamism built into that system is not to take us out (read: trigger human extinction, like most species suffered throughout evolutionary time). If these pronouncements sound too rosy, well, get a clue, fool!

Let me draw your attention to the long YouTube video embedded below. These folks have gotten the clues, though my commentary follows anyway, because SWOTI.

After processing all the hand-waving and calls to immediate action (with inevitable nods to fundraising), I was struck by two things in particular. First, XR’s co-founder Roger Hallan gets pretty much everything right despite an off-putting combination of alarm, desperation, exasperation, and blame. He argues that to achieve the global awakening needed to alter humanity’s course toward (self-)extinction, we actually need charismatic speakers and heightened emotionalism. Scientific dispassion and neutered measured political discourse (such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or as Al Gore attempted for decades before going Hollywood already fifteen years ago now) have simply failed to accomplish anything. (On inspection, what history has actually delivered is not characterized by the lofty rhetoric of statesmen and boosters of Enlightenment philosophy but rather resembles a sociologist’s nightmare of dysfunctional social organization, where anything that could possible go wrong pretty much has.) That abysmal failure is dawning on people under the age of 30 or so quite strongly, whose futures have been not so much imperiled as actively robbed. (HOW DARE YOU!? You slimy, venal, incompetent cretins above the age of 30 or so!) So it’s not for nothing that Roger Hallan insists that the XR movement ought to be powered and led by young people, with old people stepping aside, relinquishing positions of power and influence they’ve already squandered.

Second, Chris Hedges, easily the most erudite and prepared speaker/contributor, describes his first-hand experience reporting on rebellion in Europe leading to (1) the collapse of governments and (2) disintegration of societies. He seems to believe that the first is worthwhile, necessary, and/or inevitable even though the immediate result is the second. Civil wars, purges, and genocides are not uncommon throughout history in the often extended periods preceding and following social collapse. The rapidity of governmental collapse once the spark of citizen rebellion becomes inflamed is, in his experience, evidence that driving irresponsible leaders from power is still possible. Hedges’ catchphrase is “I fight fascists because they’re fascists,” which as an act of conscience allows him to sleep at night. A corollary is that fighting may not necessarily be effective, at least on the short term, or be undertaken without significant sacrifice but needs to be done anyway to imbue life with purpose and meaning, as opposed to anomie. Although Hedges may entertain the possibility that social disintegration and collapse will be far, far more serious and widespread once the armed-to-the-teeth American empire cracks up fully (already under way to many observers) than with the Balkan countries, conscientious resistance and rebellion is still recommended.

Much as my attitudes are aligned with XR, Hallan, and Hedges, I’m less well convinced that we should all go down swinging. That industrial civilization is going down and all of us with it no matter what we do is to me an inescapable conclusion. I’ve blogged about this quite a bit. Does ethical behavior demand fighting to the bitter end? Or can we fiddle while Rome burns, so to speak? There’s a lot of middle ground between those extremes, including nihilistic mischief (euphemism alert) and a bottomless well of anticipated suffering to alleviate somehow. More than altering the inevitable, I’m more inclined to focus on forestalling eleventh-hour evil and finding some grace in how we ultimately, collectively meet species death.

The Chirographic Mind (redux)

Wanted to provide an update to the previous post in my book-blogging project on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy to correct something that wasn’t clear to me at first. The term chirographic refers to writing, but I conflated writing more generally with literacy. Ong actually distinguishes chirographic (writing) from typographic (type or print) and includes another category: electronic media.

Jack Goody … has convincingly shown how shifts hitherto labeled as shifts from magic to science, or from the so-called ‘prelogical’ to the more and more ‘rational’ state of consciousness, or from Lévi-Strauss’s ‘savage’ mind to domesticated thought, can be more economically and cogently explained as shifts from orality to various stages of literacy … Marshall McLuhan’s … cardinal gnomic saying, ‘The medium is the message’, registered his acute awareness of the importance of the shift from orality through literacy and print to electronic media. [pp. 28–29]

So the book’s primary contrast is between orality and literacy, but literacy has a sequence of historical developments: chirographic, typographic, and electronic media. These stages are not used interchangeably by Ong. Indeed, they exist simultaneously in the modern world and all contribute to overall literacy while each possesses unique characteristics. For instance, reading from handwriting (printing or cursive, the latter far less widely used now except for signatures) is different from reading from print on paper or on the screen. Further, writing by hand, typing on a typewriter, typing into a word-processor, and composing text on a smartphone each has its effects on mental processes and outputs. Ong also mentions remnants of orality that have not yet been fully extinguished. So the exact mindset or style of consciousness derived from orality vs. literacy is neither fixed nor established universally but contains aspects from each category and subcategory.

Ong also takes a swing at Julian Jaynes. Considering that Jaynes’ book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1977) (see this overview) was published only seven years prior to Orality and Literacy (1982), the impact of Jaynes’ thesis must have still been felt quite strongly (as it is now among some thinkers). Yet Ong disposes of Jaynes rather parsimoniously, stating

… if attention to sophisticated orality-literacy contrasts is growing in some circles, it is still relatively rare in many fields where it could be helpful. For example, the early and late stages of consciousness which Julian Jaynes (1977) describes and related to neuro-physiological changes to the bicameral mind would also appear to lend themselves largely to much simpler and more verifiable descriptions in terms of a shift from orality to literacy. [p. 29]

In light of the details above, it’s probably not accurate to say (as I did before) that we are returning to orality from literacy. Rather, the synthesis of characteristics is shifting, as it always has, in relation to new stimuli and media. Since the advent of cinema and TV — the first screens, now supplemented by the computer and smartphone — the way humans consume information is undergoing yet another shift. Or perhaps it’s better to conclude that it’s always been shifting, not unlike how we have always been and are still evolving, though the timescales are usually too slow to observe without specialized training and analysis. Shifts in consciousness arguably occur far more quickly than biological evolution, and the rate at which new superstimuli are introduced into the information environment suggest radical discontinuity with even the recent past — something that used to be call the generation gap.

I’ve always wondered what media theorists such as McLuhan (d. 1980), Neil Postman (d. 2003), and now Ong (d. 2003) would make of the 21st century had they lived long enough to witness what has been happening, with 2014–2015 being the significant inflection point according to Jonathan Haidt. (No doubt there are other media theorists working on this issue who have not risen to my attention.) Numerous other analyses point instead to the early 20th century as the era when industrial civilization harnessed fossil fuels and turned the mechanisms and technologies of innovators decidedly against humanity. Pick your branching point.

Tab Dump 04

I simply can’t keep up with all the reading, viewing, and listening in my queue. Waking hours are too few, and concentration dissipates long before sleep overtakes. Accordingly, it’s much easier to settle into couch-potato mode and watch some mindless drivel, such as the Netflix hit Bridgerton binged in two sittings. (Unlike cinema critics, I’m not bothered especially by continuity errors, plot holes, clunky dialogue, weak character motivation, gaps of logic, or glossy decadence of the fictional worlds. I am bothered by the Kafka trap sprung on anyone who notices casting decisions that defy time and place — an ill-advised but now commonplace historical revisionism like editing Mark Twain.) As a result, blog posts are less frequent than they might perhaps be as I pronounce upon American (or more broadly, Western) culture, trying vainly to absorb it as a continuously moving target. Calls to mind the phrase Après moi, le déluge, except that there is no need to wait. A deluge of entertainment, news, analysis, punditry, and trolling has buried everyone already. So rather than the more careful consideration I prefer to post, here are some hot takes.

The Irregular Aphorist. Caitlin Johnstone offers many trenchant observations in the form of aphorisms (some of which I’ve quoted before), all gathered under the subtitle Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix. The modifier irregular only means that aphorisms are a regular but not constant feature. Her site doesn’t have a tag to that effect but probably ought to. Here’s one in particular that caught my attention:

Everything our species has tried has led us to a dying world and a society that is stark raving mad, so nobody is in any position to tell you that you are wrong.

Twin truths here are (1) the dying world and (2) societal madness, both of which I’ve been describing for some time. Glad when others recognize them, too.

Piling on. Though few still are willing to admit it, nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, e.g., distancing, masks, and lockdowns) to stall or reduce the spread of the virus failed to achieve their objectives according to this study. Instead, NPIs piled on suffering no one could forestall. I read somewhere (no link) that the world is approaching half of total, cumulative deaths/infections predicted had nothing been done to impede the pandemic running its course. Adding in deaths of despair (numbers not entirely up to date), we’re using the wrong tools to fight the wrong battle. Of course, interventions opened up giant opportunities for power grabs and vulture capitalism, so the cynic in me shrugs and wonders half aloud “what did you expect, really?”

Growth of the Managerial Bureaucracy. A blog called Easily Distracted by Timothy Burke (never on my blogroll) publishes only a few times per year, but his analysis is terrific — at least when it doesn’t wind up being overlong and inconclusive. Since a student debt jubilee is back in the news (plenty of arguments pro and con), unintended consequences are anticipated in this quote:

When you set out to create elaborate tiers that segregate the deserving poor from the comfortable middle-class and the truly wealthy, you create a system that requires a massive bureaucracy to administer and a process that forces people into petitionary humiliation in order to verify their eligibility. You create byzantine cutoff points that become business opportunities for predatory rentiers.

Something similar may well be occurring with stimulus checks being issued pro rata (has anyone actually gotten one?), but at least we’re spared any petitionary humiliations. We get whatever the algorithms (byzantine cutoff points) dictate. How those funds will be gamed and attached is not yet clear. Stay alert.

No Defense of Free Speech. Alan Jacobs often recommends deleting, unsubscribing, and/or ignoring social media accounts (after his own long love-hate relationship with them) considering how they have become wholly toxic to a balanced psyche as well as principal enablers of surveillance capitalism and narrative control. However, in an article about the manorial elite, he’s completely lost the plot that absolutism is required in defense of free speech. It’s not sufficient to be blasé or even relieved when 45 is kicked off Twitter permanently or when multiple parties conspire to kill Parler. Establishing your own turf beyond the reach of Silicon Valley censors is a nice idea but frankly impractical. Isn’t that what whoever ran Parler (or posted there) must have thought? And besides, fencing off the digital commons these very entities created has catapulted them into the unenviable position of undemocratic, unelected wielders of monopolistic power and co-conspirators to boot. That’s what needs to be curtailed, not free speech.

The Taxonomic Apocalypse. Although drawn from fiction and thus largely hypothetical, a new book (coming late 2021) by Adam Roberts called It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? surveys doomsday stories and categorizes different versions of how it all ends. Alan Jacobs (yeah, him again — must have an advance copy of the manuscript) recommends it as “a delightful and provocative little book” but fails to grok two things: (1) these stories are rehearsals-cum-preparations for the real thing, and (2) the real thing really is bearing down on us implacably and so is no longer a mere hypothetical to contemplate and categorize for shits and grins. Despite acceptance of the eventualities that await all of us, reading Roberts’ taxonomy is not something I would expect to find delightful. Skip.

Narrative Collapse. Ran Prier (no link) sometimes makes statements revealing an unexpected god’s-eye view:

[45] is a mean rich kid who figured out that if he does a good Archie Bunker impression, every lost soul with an authoritarian father will think he’s the messiah. We’re lucky that he cares only about himself, instead of having some crazy utopian agenda. But the power, and the agency, is with the disaffected citizens of a declining empire, tasting barbarism.

This is all about people wanting to be part of a group that’s part of a story. Lately, some of the big group-stories have been dying: sky father religion, American supremacy, the conquest of nature, the virtue of wealth-seeking. In their place, young and clumsy group-stories struggle and rise.

Collapse of certain fundamental stories that animate our thinking is at the core of The Spiral Staircase (see About Brutus at top), though it’s often couched in terms of consciousness in transition. Getting through the transition (only temporarily, see previous item in list) probably means completion of the Counter-Enlightenment historical arc, which necessarily includes further descent into barbarism.

Hail Mary for Individualism. I always take special notice when someone cites Allan Bloom. Alan Jacobs (um, yeah, he’s prolific and I’m using his ideas again — sue me) cites Bloom to argue that individualism or the sovereign self, a product of the Enlightenment, is already dead. No doubt, the thought-world described so ably by Bloom no longer exists, but individualism has not yet died out by attrition or been fully dissolved in nonduality. Many of us born before the advent of the Internet retain selfhood and authenticity not yet coopted by or incorporated into mass mind. Moreover, ongoing struggles over identity (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, and race that are often used improperly to define the self) result from an inchoate sense that individualism is eroding precipitously, not that it’s already passé. Defiant attempts to (re)establish an authentic self (contravening all logic and becoming critical theory of one sort or another) in the face of this loss may well be a last-ditch effort to save the self, but it’s failing.

Another Change of Sea

Returning to the subject of this post, I asserted that the modern era frustrates a deep, human yearning for meaning. As a result, the Medieval Period, and to a lesser degree, life on the highroad, became narrative fixations. Had I time to investigate further, I would read C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image (1964), but my reading list is already overfull. Nonetheless, I found an executive summary of how Lewis describes the Medieval approach to history and education:

Medieval historians varied in that some of them were more scientific, but most historians tried to create a “picture of the past.” This “picture” was not necessarily based in fact and was meant more to entertain curiosity than to seriously inform. Educated people in medieval times, however, had a high standard for education composed of The Seven Liberal Arts of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.

In the last chapter, Lewis summarizes the influence of the Medieval Model. In general, the model was widely accepted, meaning that most people of the time conformed to the same way of thinking. The model, he reiterates, satisfied imagination and curiosity, but was not necessarily accurate or factual, specifically when analyzed by modern thinkers.

Aside. Regular readers of The Spiral Staircase may also recognize how consciousness informs this blog post. Historical psychology offers a glimpse into worldviews of bygone eras, with the Medieval Period perhaps being the easiest to excavate contemplate due to proximity. Few storytellers (cinema or literature) attempt to depict what the world was truly like in the past (best as we can know) but instead resort to an ahistorical modern gloss on how men and women thought and behaved. One notable exception may be the 1986 film The Name of the Rose, which depicts the emerging rational mind in stark conflict with the cloistered Medieval mind. Sword-and-sandal epics set in ancient Rome and Greece get things even worse.