The Little Red Blog

Gender Wars: I'm OK, You're Toxic

“It is shocking that this bears saying, but there is a world of men who are smart and compassionate and eager to have vibrant, surprising conversations with other people, both men and women. The sex-specific toxicity that I have seen, when it has been obvious, has mostly been in the other court. All men are toxic and all women victims? No. Not in my name.” {Heather Heying)

At Quillette, Heather Heying weighs in on “toxic femininity,” as epitomized by young women who display themselves immodestly, thereby “creating hunger in men”: 

Young women have vast sexual power. Everyone who is being honest with themselves knows this: Women in their sexual prime who are anywhere near the beauty-norms for their culture have a kind of power that nobody else has. They are also all but certain to lack the wisdom to manage it. Toxic femininity is an abuse of that power, in which hotness is maximized, and victim status is then claimed when straight men don’t treat them as peers.  

Why shouldn't straight men treat hot young women as peers? Is it appropriate to reduce young women to the solitary trait of “hotness”? That is, can’t a woman be hot and intelligent, or hot and funny, or hot and talented?  Isn't it reductionist to categorize, stereotype, or define anyone based on any one isolated characteristic (e.g. the "dumb jock")? And don't other people--that is, people who lack the hotness Ms. Heying associates with young women--have other forms of power, which they may or may not manage wisely and which may or may not give them the upper hand against "hotness"? For that matter, can't young  men also be "hot"? 

Heying continues: 

Creating hunger in men by actively inviting the male gaze, then demanding that men have no such hunger—that is toxic femininity. Subjugating men, emasculating them when they display strength—physical, intellectual, or other—that is toxic femininity. Insisting that men, simply by virtue of being men, are toxic, and then acting surprised as relationships between men and women become more strained—that is toxic femininity. It is a game, the benefits of which go to a few while the costs are shared by all of us.  

I don’t think anyone is “demanding” that men not have a sexual hunger, only that they control it. Ms. Heying's argument seems akin to claiming that since displaying freshly baked items in a bakery window induces hunger in passersby, we can hardly blame said passersby if they smash the window in order to grab some of the delicious treats on display. “If you put something that attractive in plain sight, what do you expect?” 

Ms. Heying, I should note, is quick to offer a disclaimer:  

Hotness-amplifying femininity puts on a full display, advertising fertility and urgent sexuality. It invites male attention by, for instance, revealing flesh, or by painting on signals of sexual receptivity. This, I would argue, is inviting trouble. No, I did not just say that she was asking for it. I did, however, just say that she was displaying herself, and of course she was going to get looked at.   

There seems to be some confusion here, as shown by the odd pairing of “inviting trouble” and getting “looked at”. I may not hang out with the castrating, man-hating feminazis of Ms. Heying’s acquaintance, but I’ve never been chastised for “looking at” a woman; “staring,” of course, is another thing altogether, as is “leering”. I’m pretty sure that the trouble women have is not with being casually “looked at” by men, but with being verbally and/or physically assaulted; that, and not the hate crime of looking, is the issue.   

One could argue that if men are naturally inclined to respond to female display (as Ms. Heying insists), it is equally natural for women to engage in such display. The issue here isn’t about “display and response”; the issue is about the nature of the appropriate male response. Men are not, after all, powerless over our urges, however primal those urges may be. Disclaim as she may, Heather Heying is basically arguing “Her words said ‘No, no, no,’ but her skirt and her cleavage said ‘Yes’.” 

For instance: 

“When women doll themselves up in clothes that highlight sexually-selected anatomy, and put on make-up that hints at impending orgasm, it is toxic—yes, toxic—to demand that men do not look, do not approach, do not query.”  

Setting aside the pejoratively cutesy “doll themselves up,” I suppose much here depends on how a man approaches and what sort of query a man proffers—e.g. grabbing a woman by the arm and saying, Hey, baby, wanna fuck?  

In Ms. Heying’s world—the rarefied world of academia--the disdain to which 21st-century men are subjected apparently knows no bounds: 

Subjugating men, emasculating them when they display strength—physical, intellectual, or other—that is toxic femininity. Insisting that men, simply by virtue of being men, are toxic, and then acting surprised as relationships between men and women become more strained—that is toxic femininity.   

So men are the snowflakes now, routinely crushed and neutered by bossy, brassy women? Subjugation and emasculation are unquestionably bad, but they are also unquestionably in the eye of the beholder; women are not responsible for the frail egos of their male counterparts. It's true that, in an era of shifting gender roles (and rules), it helps to be aware of the difficulties some individuals have in transitioning from older paradigms; but those stuck in older paradigms ought to be aware, as well, that times have changed.   

It may be true that “toxic femininity” disparages men; it may be true that a kind of weaponized female sexuality can confuse and intimidate men. Men’s feelings can be hurt and their egos can be bruised. At the same time, however, “toxic masculinity” not only demeans and objectifies women, denigrates them and condescends to them; it also threatens them with physical assault. Pace Ms. Heying, but I would be cautious about comparing hurt feelings to rape. 

As with race, to which Ms. Heying refers, gender issues are fraught with difficulty; they are also impossible to understand if taken out of social, cultural, and historical context. That said, I’d like to end here on a note of comity. Heather Heying writes: 

There are many ways to be female, and many ways to be male, and some of each are bad news for everyone but the individual employing them. As a social species that has become the dominant ecological force on our planet, we can and should aspire to behave in ways that are not merely selfish, not merely competitive, but also collaborative. Toxic masculinity, and toxic femininity, are inherently selfish modes, and those not employing them should be interested in seeing them eradicated.  

That seems reasonable enough to me. 

https://quillette.com/2018/07/09/on-toxic-femininity/ 

Today's Wisdom

E.F. Schumacher:

"All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things I most cared about and that seemed to me of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life...for many years my perplexity had been complete [and] it remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps." 

{from A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED)

Maurice Nicoll:

"Once, in the Greek New Testament class on Sundays, taken by the Head Master, I dared to ask, in spite of my stammering, what some parable meant. The answer was so confused that I actually experienced my first moment of consciousness--that is, I suddenly realized that no one knew anything..."

{cited in Schumacher, A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED)

Today's Blinks

Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin (Catholic World Report) would like us all to calm down, lest the devil have his way with us: 

It’s time to admit we’re addicted to outrage. Other people are just so darn wicked. Or liberal. Or racist. Or tacky. Our political leaders know how to channel this outrage into power for themselves. Our media and entertainment industry spin it into gold. The comboxes of motherhood forums are worse than the fifth circle of Dante’s hell. And yet we eat it up [because] moral outrage feels so good. When I’m riding that train, I can forget about my own failings for a while and take some real pleasure in being righteous and right. It’s one of the devil’s more successful tricks, perverting our very sense of right and wrong into an occasion for sin. For it leads us right into the deadly—yes, deadly—sins of wrath and pride. So how do we avoid this snare, especially when there is so much to be outraged about? 

Dr. Franklin does not suggest the ever popular “ostrich” approach, in which we avoid exposure to all potential sources of outrage (the newspaper, cable news, social media, The Little Red Blog, etc.). Instead, drawing on an incident from Mark Twain’s ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN in which Huck stumbles on a murder in process, Franklin recommends the more difficult discipline of empathy: 

 Huck and Jim plan to set the men’s boat adrift, removing their only means of escape, so that Huck can call the sheriff. But when they find that their own raft has floated away, they steal the criminals’ boat in a panic, leaving the murderers stranded on the foundering steamship. Yet rather than cutting his losses and making his way to safety, Huck pauses to reflect: 

“Now was the first time that I begun to worry about the men—I reckon I hadn’t had time to before. I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix. I says to myself, there ain’t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would I like it?” 

Here Twain creates an amazing moment for Huck, where the boy perceives other people—even murderers—through the lens of empathy, imaginatively placing himself in their shoes. Not only does it show a remarkably honest humility (for who among us can claim to be truly incapable of murder?) but it also moves him to mercy: he alerts a nearby ferryboat to arrange a rescue for the men. Huck does, paradoxically, apply both justice and mercy. Once apprehended, these men might go to jail or be hanged by a judge, but Huck won’t knowingly let his fellow men drown in an accident, no matter how wicked they are. 

Empathy and mercy, a touch of the good old Golden Rule: isn’t that what we claim to believe in? 

Dr. Franklin concludes by echoing Huck’s rhetorical question: 

The culture of outrage will only cause us more problems, and may even cost us our souls. Even—and perhaps especially—facing the flaws and conflicts of our greedy and violent society, we should remember that we might come to be murderers ourselves someday. And then, we should ask along with Huck, how would we like it? 

"We might be murderers ourselves someday"; we might also be immigrants, refugees, homeless, federal employees working without pay during a government shutdown, or a hapless President of the United States in way over his head and sinking fast. That's the trouble with empathy; once you start with it, where do you stop?

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/01/08/huck-finn-the-murderer-and-modern-outrage/ 

At Aeon, Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann examine yet another unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation (and of its attendant individualism): an increase in suicides. As they note: 

The share of Protestants in a county is clearly positively associated with the suicide rate. The average suicide rate is notably higher in all-Protestant counties than in all-Catholic counties. Numerically, the difference in suicides between religious denominations in Prussia is huge: suicide rates among Protestants (at 18 per 100,000 people per year) are roughly three times higher than among Catholics. 

Protestant and Catholic denominations differ in their group structure. Protestantism is a more individualistic religion. According to this ‘sociological channel’, when life hits hard, Catholics can rely on a stronger community, which might keep up their life spirit. 

The good news here for non-Catholic Christians is that “suicide is highest among people without a religious affiliation.” So as long as you’re churched in some fashion, you have a better chance of surviving; though the authors don’t mention whether belonging to a fraternal organization, a political party, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or a bowling league might provide the same level of comfort and community. As the prophet John Lennon once said, "Whatever gets you through the night..."  

https://aeon.co/ideas/economics-helps-explain-why-suicide-is-more-common-among-protestants  

Finally: Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) offers some observations on “Becoming a Being,” drawing on writings of Susan Sontag, from whom the following quote is taken: 

“A single work is eventually a contribution to a body of work; the details of a life form part of a life history; an individual life history appears unintelligible apart from social, economic, and cultural history; and the life of a society is the sum of ‘preceding conditions’. Meaning drowns in a sea of becoming: the senseless and overdocumented rhythm of advent and suppression. The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.” 

Ms. Popova’s post drew my attention not only because of its intrinsic value, but also because I recently read the Susan Sontag essay from which Ms. Popova was quoting; the essay was written as an introduction to Emile Cioran’s THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST, and it may have been the most accessible part of the book.   

In any case, Ms. Sontag’s remarks about “being” and “becoming” suggest (to me, at least) that human existence resembles the classic paradox of Zeno’s arrow: forever in flight and unable ever to reach its destination. There may be such a thing as “the meaning of life”; but we can’t get there from here--we are too caught up in the ceaseless flow of living to be able to make sense of life.  

https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/01/16/susan-sontag-cioran-history/  

Wednesday Sermon

{N.B. Since I will be traveling on Sunday, I thought I’d post a mid-week sermon instead. You're welcome.} 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974): 

We — all of us, all of civilized humanity — have been seated and fastened onto a single, rigidly interconnected carousel, and have taken a long orbital journey. Like little kids mounted on the carousel’s horses, we thought this journey would be endless, always forward, only forward, never sideways or askew. This orbital journey has been — the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, bloody physical revolutions, democratic societies, socialist projects. This journey had to occur because the Middle Ages failed, in their time, to hold humanity’s course; because the planting on Earth of the Kingdom of God was forcibly imposed, with essential personal rights being revoked in favor of the Whole. We were violently pulled, forced toward the spiritual, and so we tore away and dove — headlong and unbounded — into the Material. Thus began a long era of humanistic individualism, the construction of a civilization based on the principle that man is the measure of all things, that man is above all. 

This whole inevitable journey greatly enriched humanity’s experience, but it has exhausted itself before our eyes. The foundational errors that were ignored at the beginning of the journey now take their revenge. Having established man — with all his shortcomings and greed — as the highest measure of all things, and having given ourselves over to the Material, immoderately and with abandon, we have now clogged up the works amidst profuse pollution. We are mired in the earth’s pollution. It fills, clogs all spheres of our existence. In the material sphere this pollution is by now all too evident to everyone. It has poisoned the air, water, the settled parts of the land’s surface, and is now spreading to the unsettled parts. It has been the unseemly reward for our mighty industrial endeavors, just as in the everyday lives of individual people the most appealing advertisements, packaging, and plastics turn into piles of urban refuse. 

But also in the so-called spiritual sphere, this pollution bombards and presses us: with heavy lumps unabsorbable by our eyes, ears, chests; with the incessant hammering-out of ideas that seem to resound as all-encompassing and self-evident but in reality are helpless and shallow; with false science; with affectation in art — in short, with everything that knows no responsibility above Man, that is, above you and me and people of our ilk. Our blustering civilization has completely robbed us of a concentrated inner life, dragged our souls out into a bazaar, whether of commerce or of party politics. In the social sphere our centuries-long journey has brought us in some cases to the brink of anarchy, in other cases to a stable despotism. 

It would appear that human civilization is approaching a historic turn (in everyday life and in worldview), one as significant as the turn from the Middle Ages to Modern History — if only we are not too careless or crestfallen to miss it...Let us find in our souls the stature to discover once again that man is not the crown of the universe, but that there exists above him a Higher Spirit. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-decries-materialism-modern-society/

Paranoia Strikes Deep

"Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep; it starts when you're always afraid, get out of line, the man comes and takes you away..." (Buffalo Springfield)

It was probably inevitable, but I’m afraid that Rod Dreher’s cultural paranoia (The SJW’s won’t stop until they've killed us all!) is infecting others at The American Conservative. 

A TAC contributor (and student at Georgetown U.) by the name of Grayson Quay has written a brief article with the intriguing title “How to Talk to Someone Who Wants to Put You in a Gulag”. (Spoiler alert: you cannot, it turns out, talk to such a person. All you can do is warn them, “When you come for me, I will fight back” and then resume “sharpening [your] rhetorical and literal weapons”.) 

Who, you may be asking, is Grayson Quay and who are the people who want to put him in a gulag? Apparently, Mr. Quay is a member of America’s most unfairly treated class: “straight, white, conservative, religious,” not to mention, “male”. Having helped elect Donald Trump to office, people like Grayson Quay now find themselves inveighed against by their fellow citizens—how very awful! This must be the first time in American history that members of the losing political party have displayed such bad form and poor sportsmanship. 

According to Quay, however, the anti-Trump venom is but a symptom of a larger and pre-existing sickness in America, a sickness called “liberalism”.  He quotes none other than Rod Dreher: “Liberalism does not intend to tolerate [conservative, orthodox Christians] for one more minute than it has to.” To which accusation, Quay adds his own: 

Anyone who doesn’t agree with the progressives’ increasingly radical beliefs concerning sex, race, and gender belongs on the ash heap of history, and the sooner those backward hicks can be banished there, the better. Conservatives’ continued existence in the public square is not just an annoyance, but an ongoing act of violence against women, minorities, and the queer community. 

It’s a darned good thing for Dreher and Quay that liberals haven’t come for them (yet) and that the purging of the public square has thus far inexplicably failed to include The American Conservative, which continues on its Merry way (TAC was edited for several years by Robert Merry), its editors and authors managing to stay one step ahead of the thought police (John Leo’s self-aggrandizing phrase). 

In any case, Grayson Quay lives in a scary world indeed, what with his retrograde opinions. Not only is he forced to sit through college seminars where the works of radicals like Angela Davis and “Fanon Jackson”* are shoved down the throats of intimidated students, but he also has to endure this: 

I recently read a thread of tweets from a user with over 20,000 Twitter followers suggesting that white people are genetically predisposed to violence and oppression, “[j]ust like dogs are bred for temperament.” The simile is no accident. If a dog is too aggressive, you use training to “reprogram” it. If that doesn’t work, you put it down. When I expressed a traditional Christian view of sexuality (while also denouncing violence against gay people and expressing sympathy for them), another Twitter user told me I was no better than ISIS. We kill ISIS. With drones. 

In all seriousness, we should behave ourselves better on social media. I do not, however, believe that Grayson Quay was or is in any physical danger from the ill-mannered liberals on Twitter; getting hateful retorts on social media is not the same as receiving a death threat from, say, Fanon Jackson. 

Don’t try telling that to Mr. Quay, though. He has assessed his enemies and concluded: 

Give these people their way, and those like me will end up in gulags, re-education camps, and gas chambers. ^  

I have no doubt that there exists among us some unknown number of unhinged left-wing radicals. I will wager dollars to whatever alternative currency Grayson Quay offers that none of those people are plotting to put him (or those like him) in gulags, re-education camps, and gas chambers. Quay, again following the example of Rod Dreher, has panicked himself by invoking historical precedents that simply do not apply, and the use of which is, in this context, frankly reprehensible.  

My advice is this: calm down, please, young Master Quay. No one is going to put you in a gulag. No gas chambers are being prepared for you. As for a “re-education” camp: well, at least until you learn the difference between Frantz Fanon and George Jackson, I don’t see that one would do you any harm.  

_______________________________________________________________ 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-to-talk-to-someone-who-wants-to-put-you-in-a-gulag/  

*“Fanon Jackson” does not exist. Mr. Quay has confused/conflated Frantz Fanon and George Jackson, the latter of whom was responsible for the quote Quay cites: “The government of the U.S.A. and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed.” That statement appeared in Jackson’s posthumously published book BLOOD IN MY EYE; Grayson Quay should rest easy knowing (assuming he knows) that Jackson was killed in 1971. In fairness, Quay’s mistake is understandable: Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Frantz Fanon, Huey Newton (or Huey Lewis?), Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, George Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Reggie Jackson—I mean, who can tell these black radicals apart, anyway? 

^ “These people”? Oh, Mr. Quay: have you no sense of irony? At long last, sir, have you left no sense of irony?

What's an Economy For?

In the course of a battle of half-wits with Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro (National Review) raises an interesting point—what's an economy for? Defending market capitalism against Carlson’s heretical criticisms (excommunicado! as Ian McShane declared about John Wick), Shapiro claims:

Supply and demand economics has powered most of the world’s human beings out of extreme poverty, and led to the richest society in human history. It has allowed us to live longer, in bigger houses, in more comfort. It has meant fewer dead children and more living parents. If we’ve blown that advantage, that’s our own fault. Traditional conservatives recognized that the role of economics is to provide prosperity — to raise the GDP. The role of a social fabric and a value system is to provide meaning. ¹

Mr. Shapiro appears to believe that the economy is somehow separate from, or can somehow be separated from, the “social fabric” and the “value system”; even though work, which is a significant part of the economy, has traditionally been considered a source of meaning and value for individuals. Shapiro cites “traditional conservatives” on this matter, but I can name at least two of them who might beg to differ.

The late Russell Kirk, for one, who wrote the following (in his ECONOMICS: Work and Prosperity):

Some people would like to separate economics from politics, but they are unable to do so. Another name for economics is political economy…a sound economy cannot exist without a political state to protect it.

Similarly, some people would like to separate economics from morals, but they are unable to do so. For unless most men and women recognize some sort of moral principles, an economy cannot function except in a small and precarious way. Moral beliefs, sometimes called moral values, make possible production, trading, saving, and the whole economic apparatus.

All human creations and institutions have some connection with moral ideas and moral habits, for human beings are moral creatures. Concepts of right and wrong haunt us in everything we do—whether or not we wish to be concerned with moral questions.

If the economy is not the source of our deepest values, it nonetheless ought to reflect, incorporate, and encourage them; at the very least, it ought not to undermine them. The same is true of the meaning(s) we attach to our existence; if the economy does not enable us to realize them (and if the advertising which fuels consumer capitalism contradicts them at every turn), then  “meaning” becomes ever more difficult to achieve.

To be clear: Russell Kirk was a defender of market capitalism, which he said had brought Americans a veritable “cornucopia” of material blessings. He believed that capitalism was built on a strong moral foundation of virtues (honesty, trust, and courage); which confirms that it would never have occurred to him to characterize the economy as a realm apart from values, virtues, and the social fabric--for Kirk, they were all intertwined.

If it could be shown—and I contend it has been shown beyond reasonable doubt—(a) that capitalism’s virtues are outweighed by its vices, (b) that it is in the nature of corporate capitalism to entangle itself with the State (e.g. “crony capitalism” and “regulatory capture”), and (c) that a modern capitalist economy becomes increasingly totalitarian in scope, overwhelming social institutions and making commercial values (the “cash nexus”) the only common denominator of an otherwise fragmented society: given such a showing, I suspect Mr. Kirk would no longer be quite so supportive of market capitalism (though he would of course still rail against communism and other forms of collectivism).

A second “traditional conservative” who would have unquestionably quarreled with Ben Shapiro is the late Richard Weaver, author of IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. In the “Southern agrarian” tradition, Weaver had nothing but contempt for “the enthronement of economic man,” which he claimed had been responsible for “a subversion of values which has been a scandal of the last century [and has] played havoc with our thinking about the whole world.” Weaver explicitly dismissed “economic determinism,” the modern effort “to explain all human activity as product or by-product of the search for economic satisfactions.”

Even in defending private property, which he saw as “the last metaphysical right” left to man in modern Western societies, Weaver clarified that he was not speaking of “property” in the capitalist sense:

I would make abundantly clear that the last metaphysical right offers nothing in defense of that kind of property brought into being by finance capitalism. Such property is, on the contrary, a violation of the very notion of “proprietas”. This amendment of the institution to suit the uses of commerce and technology has done more to threaten property than anything else yet conceived. For the abstract property of stocks and bonds, the legal ownership of enterprises never seen, actually destroy the connection between man and his substance...property in this sense becomes a fiction useful for exploitation and makes impossible the sanctification of work. ²

In a 2007 essay (at First Things) about Weaver’s values, John Howting wrote this:

Economic man strives for progress and sees competition as the surest route to it. He seeks the next machine that will produce more widgets per hour, replace more working men, and give consumers lower prices at the big shop. Weaver described this obsession with innovation as “the exaltation of becoming over being.” “Becoming” is progressive, while “Being” is conservative. This raises a question for self-styled conservatives who deify economics: What exactly are you conserving? ³

If Ben Shapiro wants to defend the purity of market capitalism, that's all well and good. He should be more cautious, however, in claiming for it the imprimatur of “traditional conservatives,” at least some of whom knew that man does not live by GDP alone. In that conservative understanding, an economy ought to feed, clothe, and sustain—in the broadest possible sense--human communities without exploitation of community members or of the natural environment; and by that standard, capitalism has little to brag about.

_________________________________________________

¹ https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/tucker-carlson-populism-america-needs-virtue-before-prosperity/ 

² The reference to "the sanctification of work” is itself a reminder of what modern capitalism, in its unstinting devotion to GDP, has destroyed.

³ https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/12/ideas-still-have-consequences

Full disclosure: Mr. Howting’s essay was written in defense of Donald Trump, who, according to Howting, “is an embattled culture warrior.”  That does not speak highly of Mr. Howting’s ability to discern character, but it should not reflect on Richard Weaver’s insights.

Sunday Sermon

Philip K. Dick (from VALIS):

One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend. The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.  Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.  One by one he draws us out of the world.

We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent.

The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind. We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

The changing information which we experience as World is an unfolding narrative. It tells about the death of a woman. This woman, who died long ago, was one of the primordial twins. She was half of the divine syzygy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The Mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the Brain consists of a permanent record of her existence, and, if read, will be understood this way. All the information processed by the Brain—experienced by us as the arranging and rearranging of physical objects—is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoebae are traces of her. The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering Mind which is now alone.

This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists. The ancient Greek thinkers understood the nature of this pan-psychism, but they could not read what it was saying. We lost the ability to read the language of the Mind at some primordial time; legends of this fall have come down to us in a carefully-edited form. By “edited” I mean falsified. We suffer the Mind’s bereavement and experience it inaccurately as guilt. The Mind is not talking to us but by means of us. Its narrative passes through us and its sorrow infuses us irrationally. As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul.

In Summary: thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements—change—in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it—i.e., it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).

We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can’t read outside and can’t hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word “idiot” is the word “private.” Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.

From loss and grief the Mind has become deranged. Therefore we, as parts of the universe, the Brain, are partly deranged…The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.

Saturday Bafflements

 

The Baffler is one of my go-to websites for a Left-wing take on events, a take generally delivered with panache, brio, and other zesty spices.

 

Example the first: Ben Ehrenreich scolds us for being “in thrall to the fetish of progress: the belief that history has a direction and a purpose, and that humankind is ascending a steady if circuitous route to greater perfection.”

 

The point is, we keep getting blind-sided by history, which we thought we had figured out or even managed to transcend. As Ehrenreich says (citing Walter Benjamin), we are captives of “an unexamined faith in a highly irrational notion, one that blinds us to facts and conditions that would otherwise be obvious—and that, against all evidence opposing it, continues to inform the shape of our thoughts and the contours of our political discourse.”

Ehrenreich traces our progress “fetish” only back as far as the year 1750; for anyone interested in its more ancient lineage, I recommend Robert Nisbet’s THE HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS, a book with which I always seem to be making progress but which I never get around to finishing.

 

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/after-the-storm-ehrenreich 

 

Example the second, showing The Baffler to be in a thematic frame of mind: along with Ben Ehrenreich’s essay, it also offers one by the invaluable George Scialabba. In “Nothing Before Us,” Scialabba weighs “the case for progress in an age of anxiety”. He does so by reviewing three recent books (from the perennially optimistic Gregg Easterbrook, the sanguine futurist Yuval Noah Harari, and the Cassandra-esque Chris Hedges) that purport to evaluate our current state of affairs and to predict our future.

 

For my money, the most interesting part of the essay is about Chris Hedges, about whom Scialabba writes:

 

I doubt Chris Hedges has ever been invited to give a TED talk. If he has, then someone was fired for it, I’m pretty sure. Hedges is as angry and eloquent as Harari is wry and cool. America: The Farewell Tour is a chronicle of decay, a tableau of anomie, a portrait of blight. As in his other books, Hedges goes out and finds forlorn or downtrodden people, reports what they say, and takes their plight as the text for a political sermon. In this book, the cast of characters includes gamblers, addicts, antifa protesters, survivalists, prisoners, and the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

 

Scialabba notes that the America observed by Chris Hedges seems not at all to resemble the America glowingly approved by Gregg Easterbrook or predicted by Yuval Noah Harari, which leads him to conclude:

 

So are things getting better or worse? Both, evidently—different things for different people in different places. And which way of answering the question is best: compiling statistics, or conjuring science-fictional utopian/dystopian scenarios, or in-depth reporting on living, suffering individuals? All three. There will be real, often bitter political disagreements among proponents of each approach. But the large, indeed dominant, presence in contemporary American politics of plutocrats, irrationalists, and authoritarians, with their own repellent visions of the future, should compel the rest of us to listen to one another.

 

I find that summation, from an observer as acute as George Scialabba, as disappointingly mundane as it is anti-climactic: Is America's glass half full or half empty? It's both! Let's just keep talking about it! 

 

 https://thebaffler.com/salvos/nothing-before-us-scialabba

 

Finally, The Baffler example the third—not about progress, but about the “emergence of the online right in the past year or two” accompanied by “a whole host of related aesthetic quirks, among them a genuine obsession with terrible, borderline nonsensical charts,” which development is definitely not progress.

 

In “Eat Your Chart Out,” Jon Greenaway provides and critiques some illustrative examples of bad charting (my favorite is Scott Adams’ “Brain Re-Wiring" chart, which achieves Glenn Beck levels of stupidity):

 

What we see in these terrible graphics, these bizarre memes and these willfully obtuse charts is the vanishing of a shared political vision, replaced by a completely imagined political reality...as a result, the real political and material reality that we all share is abolished. In its place, as we see daily on the online right, is the jury-rigged shareable meme that both imposes order on a (now completely imagined) political universe and becomes accepted as being the actual, true state of things.

 

Hyper-reality expressed in easily compressible jpeg form becomes the ground for politics. This is the way that we can start to understand not just why these charts and graphs and infographics exist, but more fundamentally, what they do. The intellectual work done by these charts is to abruptly impose a degree of order onto a world that often seems to resist right-wing and conspiratorial political analysis.

 

Having skewered the political Right, Greenaway closes by skewering the rest of us:

 

The bold thinkers of the online right have no monopoly on these atrophies of critical thinking—though they have absolutely perfected the form. Indeed, you can find much the same raging chart idolatry in another group that’s managed to turn politics into a kind of abstracted fantasy—the centrist Democrat. The wonkish liberal crowd loves information, and devoutly fetishizes facts and smart graphs that can reduce the complexities of political reality into banal platitudinous data points. In this narrow compass of wonkery, matters like survival under the pressures of late capitalism can become cleverly nullified through the correct combination of tax credits and means testing.

 

Greenaway’s analysis might help resolve the dilemma George Scialabba faced in his essay: should one give more weight to charts and statistics (the Gregg Easterbrook method), to futuristic projections and edgy thought experiments (the Yuval Noah Harari method), or to the real lives of real people (the Chris Hedges method)? Scialabba opted for “all of the above,” but I prefer Greenaway’s conclusion:

 

One of the ways that left-wing thought is most helpful is its insistence on materialism, on examining the world as it is. This stubborn empiricism entails not only the rejection of the conspiratorial nonsense of the online right who think that reading novels makes you an empathetic Democrat, but also the refutation of the idealistic metaphysical dreams of centrist liberals who imagine a perfectly rational consumer as the universal subject.

Materialism requires a willingness to think about the real conditions of the world honestly and critically—to see the world as it is, and not as we would wish it to be. With that in mind, it’s worth remembering that the world depicted in these terrible charts, and the people whom the online right seek to describe as omnipotent political actors are phantasms—fantasies of argument that are designed to do nothing more than reshape what we think we know about the world into something else entirely.

 

What’s vital then, is not to try to understand these baffling visuals, but instead to understand the world around us, its contingency, flaws, and fragilities—together with the ways that political analysis, connected to the material reality of the world we share can herald a new way of living, for all people.

 

Amen. Charts aren't us; or, as Alfred Korzybski said, "The map is not the territory." Cartographers have their uses; but in the end, understanding the world requires exploration, engagement, and getting our hands dirty.

 

https://thebaffler.com/latest/eat-your-chart-out-greenaway

Repeal and Replace?

Much to everyone's surprise, and despite Promises Made and Promises Kept to get rid of it, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) still exists; and while work continues apace on Wall (Adding jobs to Economy! Protecting us from Bad Hombres!), I thought I would take a few minutes to remind people that everything the Republicans have ever said about Obamacare has been a lie—or, to be charitable, badly mistaken.

How did Republicans lie to us about the ACA? Let me count the ways. First, and to dispose of the lowest-hanging fruit: please raise your hand if you or anyone you know has been Death-Paneled by government bureaucrats under the Affordable Care Act…

Exactly. Total number of Death Panel-induced fatalities: zero. And that includes Alaska.

The other main lies about (or objections to) Obamacare were: it would be a job killer; it would make health care unaffordable; it would put government bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions; it would force private insurers out of business; it would end Freedom as we knew it.

The first claim—Obamacare would kill jobs—was articulated over and over by Republican leadership, so much so that “Obamacare” became, as a matter of course, “job-killing Obamacare”. For instance: “Five days before Obama signed the law, in fact, speaker John Boehner declared that the president was pushing “his job-killing government takeover of healthcare that will hurt small businesses.” Years after the law was passed, critics continued trumpeting this theme, Ted Cruz calling Obamacare “the biggest job-killer in this country,” and even claiming [in 2016] that “millions of Americans have lost their jobs” because of the law.”

Those allegations would seem to be easily refuted by the fact that job creation has proceeded quite nicely since the passage of the ACA—we are experiencing the longest continuous stretch of job growth in history, 99 months of uninterrupted gains, a period of time that almost coincides with the ACA’s existence.

That should end the “job killer” discussion, but it hasn’t, and it won’t, as Peter Ubel (at Forbes) explains:

Liberals point to steady national job growth since passage of the law as evidence that Obamacare has not killed jobs. Conservatives point out that, for all we know, job growth would have been even higher had Obamacare not become the law of the land.

That’s quite a standoff; actual jobs created versus imaginary jobs that might have been created, not to mention all the ponies we would have if not for Obamacare. I would suggest, when in doubt, go with the facts and not with the ponies—but then, I’m a liberal.

Fun Fact: “Hiring in the health care sector has been fueling job growth in recent years, largely because of the Affordable Care Act.”

What other disasters, besides Death Panels and devastating job losses, did Obamacare’s critics foresee? Since the ACA represented a “government takeover” of health care, it was bound to destroy private insurers. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) sounded the death knell in October 2010: "There will be no insurance industry left in three years."

Last I looked, the insurance industry was intact. In fact, one new GOP criticism of Obamacare is that it constitutes “a giveaway” to private insurance companies, thus revealing that the GOP strategy is to criticize the ACA from any and every angle possible, letting neither facts nor logical consistency get in the way.

Along the same lines, Obamacare was said to endanger Medicare, especially since Obama had the audacity to steal money from Medicare to build Wall help fund his socialist boondoggle. Senator Lindsey Graham warned, "The legacy for Medicare is going to be devastating. If you're a senior citizen in South Carolina and New York, you're going to lose your Medicare Advantage."

The following (from Ehealth Insurance) may reassure Senator Graham and help him rise from his oft-used (“This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics and if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to this guy!”) fainting couch:

If you reside in South Carolina and are eligible to participate, you have access to a Medicare Advantage plan. Statewide, 55 Medicare Advantage plans are providing coverage to beneficiaries in 2018. 28 percent of Medicare beneficiaries in South Carolina had Medicare Advantage plans and other Health plans in 2018.

You may have access to a variety of Medicare Advantage plans. Examples of the types of Medicare Advantage plans operating in South Carolina may include:

Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO) plans, in which your primary care physician providers or arranges most of your health-care services. In an HMO, your health care must be delivered by providers who participate in the plan’s network in most cases. Some plans include prescription drug coverage.

Preferred Provider Organizations (PPO) plans, in which you pay a lower cost-share when you receive covered services from providers who participate in the plan’s network and a higher cost-share when you receive covered services from a non-network provider. Some plans include prescription drug coverage.

Special Needs Plans (SNP), which are designed to assist people who are eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, and those with certain health conditions. Special Needs Plans include prescription drug coverage. Monthly premiums may vary among plans. Some may have premiums as low as $0. You must continue to pay your Part B premium.

The facts, to the extent that opponents of Obamacare actually care about them, are that the ACA—despite unprecedented efforts, by Republicans in state and federal governments, to sabotage it—has expanded healthcare coverage to more Americans than ever before, has helped slow the rise in healthcare costs and in insurance premiums, has fostered innovation in healthcare delivery, has encouraged use of preventive care, and has contributed to a reduction in bankruptcies due to medical bills. All those things, not coincidentally, were among the goals explicitly stated by the ACA’s designers.

You can, of course, find studies by such conservative sources as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation that will dispute the above claims; feel free to review them, but please take them with at least a grain of salt (not covered, alas, by Obamacare). By almost any impartial standard, and against an incredible amount of resistance, the Affordable Care Act has been, and continues to be, a success.

Has Obamacare worked perfectly? No, it has not. Could it be improved? Absolutely. But the sort of rhetoric employed about it (not to mention the sandbagging) by conservatives is unhelpful, as well as disingenuous and, frankly, histrionic.  

Of course, today’s Republicans can draw upon an iconic role model for such hyperbole: St. Ronald of Reagan himself. Recall the Gipper's famous warning about the dangers of “socialized medicine” (Medicare) back in 1965: "We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

That sounds like a great subject to talk about while working on Wall! 

__________________________________

Some helpful sources regarding the successes and failures of the Affordable Care Act, as well as the lies told about it:

https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/medicare/medicare-by-state/medicare-in-south-carolina

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/26/18113313/obamacare-mandate-tax

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-big-secret-about-the-affordable-care-act-its-working-just-fine/2018/10/31/068da248-dd41-11e8-85df-7a6b4d25cfbb_story.html?utm_term=.01d3b4ef5154

https://www.thebalance.com/causes-of-rising-healthcare-costs-4064878

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247287.php

https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2016/11/30/another-obamacare-failure-it-wasnt-a-job-killer/#7d7293a6462e

The Devaluation of Aging

In "No Country for Old Age," Joseph E. Davis (at The Hedgehog Review) offers a powerful argument that "In our society...old age is understood and framed in ways that lead inevitably to its devaluation. Its status is low and arguably is falling."

I highly recommend you read "No Country for Old Age" in its entirety. Here, to whet your appetite, is an excerpt:

The psychologist Carl Jung once observed that “a human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.”

If old age is to be more than a “pitiful appendage,” then we need a way of relating to ourselves, the life course, and death that gives getting older genuine significance. Current constructions of old age in individualistic terms of self-reliance, the fit body, productive accomplishments, or an imperative to deny or defeat aging technologically cannot but deepen our predicament and the need to render it invisible. This is what makes the cultural logic of these constructions irredeemable. They leave us in a cul-de-sac, hemmed in by a predatory commercial culture, a punishing ideology of health, fewer and weaker social ties, an ethic of active striving and mastery, and a mechanistic picture of ourselves.

Moving beyond the devaluation of old age requires other orientations and other practices for which we must look elsewhere—to other societies, past or present, and to older traditions.
We know, from history, theology, philosophy, and anthropology, that there are other possibilities. The temporal orientation need not be toward an open, this-worldly future, but toward wisdom, narrative, memory, and, for people of faith, a future that is eternity. The social orientation of the evening of life need not be individualistic, but toward family and the localization and strengthening of social relations. Similarly, the view of the life cycle need not take its bearings from youth and middle age but from roles and identities appropriate to old age, with their own norms and rewards. These norms and rewards need not be defined in terms of active striving and productivity, but in terms of release, such as from social climbing, and a more contemplative attitude toward the world. Surely, in the last stage of life, health and longevity need not continue to be treated as ends in themselves. Rather, they might be set within a larger framework of limits, a recognition of our vulnerability and dependence, and the ethic of a well-lived life. There are other possibilities, and if we are to free ourselves from the iron cage to which our cultural logic consigns us, we must look to them for direction.

Mr. Davis's observations about modern individualism, loneliness, medicalization, and commercialization have wider applications as well. Take, for instance, this description of our new moralism towards what we call "health and wellness":

Health is [conceived as] a matter of individual choice, and it becomes each person’s moral duty to muster all of his or her energies to be successful. Insufficient initiative, insufficient efforts to stay informed, incomplete compliance with expert advice, and the like are grounds for potential blame, stigmatized as fatalism and passivity, and made the target of interventions by others. Calling, and getting called, to account for any slacking has become a pervasive phenomenon, so common that we offer anticipatory apologies when we know that others know that we have done anything less than prioritize our health and longevity. There are no excuses. 

You can, and should, read the essay at this link:

https://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2018_Fall_Davis.php