Just bring enough for the ritual

[a follow-up to What is it like to be batshit?. See also Voting as Ritual and Republic of Heaven. ]

So there is this election happening in mere days, and it feels like a crucial choice point for the country. If we re-elect Trump, that means something very definite for the story of the US and for the American character, to the extent there is such a thing. And if we don't, it means something else. The choice is stark, the outcome uncertain. It's a collective choice, made by this weird group mind constituted by the biannual mechanism/ritual of aggregation we call an election. To the extent there is an American character (or mind, or soul) this is a key part of how it works, how the whole is constituted out of its parts.

In most past elections, I've had feeling of apathy (not always dominant, but always there). Neither of the major parties represented me or my thinking, such as it was, and I always felt like I was choosing the lesser of two evils. "If voting could change the system, it would be against the law" – that's a funny radical bumper sticker but also encodes an important truth. In a sense voting is supposed to be unimportant.

But during the same decades that I was growing older and thus more conservative (at some level this is inexorable, the interests of the old are not those of the young), the nature of the mainstream parties shifted, until Democrats are the true conservative party (in that they want to preserve the existing institutions of society) and Republicans are the radical wreckers.

So now I find myself in the position of supporting whole-heartedly the kind of mainstream Democrat I disdained in the past. I mean, with every fiber of my being! That feels really weird! But these are weird times.

Maybe I'm kidding myself. It's just politics and politics is just theater, not where the actually important work of the world takes place. Maybe I've bought too far into the media narrative of good and evil. Besides, there is little I can do other than vote and give some financial support to key campaigns. I can of course flame on the internet, which is not exactly nothing, but I can't delude myself that it makes a ton of difference.

Still, history is unfolding, and we are all drawn into the drama, like it or not.

It's important to understand what Trump is, what his role is in the national drama. He's not an out-of-nowhere abberation, no matter how abberant his behavior. He didn't come from nowhere and if defeated, what he represents isn't going away; the 40% or so of the country who supports him isn't going away. Jamelle Bouie wrote a really good piece on this:

For many millions of Americans, the presidency of Donald Trump has been a kind of transgression, an endless assault on dignity, decency and decorum. They experience everything — the casual insults, the vulgar tweets, the open racism, the lying, the tacit support for dangerous extremists and admiration of foreign strongmen — as an attack on the fabric of American society itself. And they see the worst of this administration, like separating children from their families at the border, as an unparalleled offense against the values of American democracy.

… Trump is transgressive, yes. But his transgressions are less a novel assault on American institutions than they are a stark recapitulation of past failure and catastrophe.

…For as much as it seems that Donald Trump has changed something about the character of this country, the truth is he hasn’t. What is terrible about Trump is also terrible about the United States.

So from that point of view, maybe the election is not that important, we are going to have the same history and character regardless (Bouie doesn't say this, but it's an obvious inference).

But it feels like something important is at stake here, that somehow we as a country are putting everything on the line here for a chance at redemption. If we elect Donald Trump twice, it's clear that he represents not merely an unpleasant facet of the American character, but a dominant one. The gross, boorish, bullying, and fraudulent part. The ignorant part, the shortsighted part, the jingoistic part, the cruel part. The part that cares only about strength and knows nothing of justice, love, honor, beauty or caring. The proudly stupid part. And of course the racist and patriarchal part.

That is, of course, not all there is to the American character. There is the inventive side, the pragmatist side, the heroic side, the frontier side, the decent side, the helpful and compassionate and welcoming side, the creative side, the visionary side. The side that held out hope to refugees and immigrants like my parents. Those virtues are just as real as the vices that Trump has brought to the foreground.

It feels like this election is going to say whether those virtues are strong enough to defeat the forces that Trump represents, or whether we give into our worst version of ourself as a country.

America 4.0

Regardless of how the election goes this is going to be a different country than it was before. Same problems and resources, different collective narratives. We are either in an ongoing catastrophe, or we will have pulled back from the edge of one.

My old friend John Redford (who has a fine blog of his own) said the other day that we are in the early days of America 4.0. That is, there have been three fairly different versions of the US:

• version 1.0 runs from the founding to the Civil War
  
• version 2.0 is from the Civil War until depression/World War era
  
• version 3.0 is from the end of WWII until just about now
  

(Although on reconsideration maybe 3.0 ended in 1989 with the cold war and the years from then to now have been part of an ongoing transition)

In each of these transitions, the nation faced an existential crisis and managed to reinvent itself, often through violence. We may be going through that again, or we may be going through death throes. But it's pretty clear that the current version of America isn't working at all and something new had damn well better get put in place and soon.

What will America 4.0 look like? I really have no idea, although I sure hope that it at least uses technology well. The election won't decide that, but it will determine whether the tentative gropes toward a viable future can start now or we have to have another four years of destruction of the old order before the new one can be born.

[ title due to Warren Zevon:

]

What is it like to be batshit?

I asked this on Twitter the other day and got not much in the way of answer.

What is it like to be a Trump supporter?

— mtraven (@mtraven) October 24, 2020

Although I have studied the right, and even gone so far as to try to intellectually engage with them at times, I find I can't quite wrap my head around what it must be like to be a Donald Trump supporter. That is to say: I can to some extent understand the arguments and the emotional dynamics that lead someone into being, say, a libertarian or neoreactionary, or even a frothing racist. These ideologies may be wrong or loathsome, but it feels like I kind of understand them, in that I can imagine what it is like to hold to them. They may be rooted in bad emotions (anger, hate, fear), but I'm human, I have my share of that stuff, I can sort of understand how it can warp your beliefs.

But I can't quite put myself in the place of a Donald Trump supporter. Something in my imagination balks. He is such a viscerally repellent figure. How the hell can anybody look at him and say, that's who I want to follow, give me more of that? The man is such a constant display of the worst parts of human nature, and the worst parts of the American character. The constant bragging and whining. The proud ignorance. The tacky fraudulence of everything he's involved with. The utter contempt for truth or for any values other than "winning". Think of a good human quality: kindess, courage, strength, wisdom – Trump embodies the opposite of it.

So even if I was somehow on his side ideologically – say I hated Mexicans for some reason, or wanted to keep blacks out of my leafy suburbs, or felt like sticking it to China, whatever – I don't think I could get past the utter vileness of the man.

There's something almost metaphysically disturbing about Trump; he emits a whiff of the abyss, his triumphs hint at the death of meaning itself, the end of virtue. The cultists attracted to him remind me of those that appear in Lovecraft stories: people who have utterly given over their humanity to something depraved and alien, and worship it with a savage inhuman joy. I'm in the position of a Lovecraft narrator watching helplessly as these inhuman powers manifest themselves in a slow but inexorable march towards madness.

But horror aside, what drives these people? Either they don't see what I see (but it's not like Trump's qualities are subtle or hard to detact), or they see it and just don't care. Other considerations are more important. For example: Here's the editor of the National Review explaining that voting for Trump:

is the only way for his voters to say to the cultural Left, “No, sorry, you’ve gone too far.”…Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between….To put it in blunt terms, for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture.

Which is basically saying that the hatred of "the cultural Left" is so salient to these people that it overrides every other consideration, such as basic decency, esthetics, or even life itself (since Trump is quite directly responsible for the massive US death rate from Covid). The author of that piece says in the very next sentence "This may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration." But yeah, fuck the left. I guess that is not entirly beyond my ability to imagine – I know what hate is like. I hate Trump, Trump's supporters hate people like me. They think we have "the whip hand" and it is so important for them to seize this opportunity to say fuck you. There's a certain symmetry of feeling there.

But I can't quite make the symmetry work. The sides do not appear to be mirror reflections of the other; one side seems clearly better. No matter how hard I try, I can't take a neutral view of this conflict. There are those who make a virtue of being above the ideological fray, and maybe they are smarter than me, or more morally advanced, that's certainly a possibility. Maybe I am overly locked into my worldview, maybe I am deficient in the necessary empathic imagination. Maybe I am too bought into a constructed media narrative, and they just happen to be bought into a different one.

However: this is not a matter of preference, it's literally a matter of life and death. Covid is a life and death issue; so is fascism. So much as I might like to go all abstract and above the fray, I think the situation demands choosing a side and fighting for it. One thing about Trump, he makes it really easy to see who the enemy is, even if he confounds understanding.

The title of this post is a reference to philosopher Thomas Nagel's well-known paper What Is It Like To Be a Bat? The point of that paper is that while bats are presumably conscious and it makes sense to talk of their experience, that experience has to be utterly unlike our own, given the vastly different world the bat lives in by virtue of its different senses and abilities. 

Trumpists are alien along a different but no less confounding dimension.

Lockdown Review of Books

This is the list of books I've read so far during the lockdown, although it includes a few entries from just before things got serious. In fact the first two I remember reading on my last BART commutes back in February, which seems like the distant past now.

It's kind of all over the place, for better or worse. I'd like to say it represents my wide-ranging intellect but it could also just be randomness. But if you think this list is random, you should look at my stacks of unread books and wishlists!

On second thought there's quite a bit of thematic unity to be teased out here. The literary novels (White Noise, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Blood Meridian) are all more or less obviously about nihilism, all are attempts to face nothingness, meaninglessness, and death head-on.

This bleak topic is counterbalanced by a whole slew of visionaries who are untroubled by the nihilistic disease and instead create elaborate, vast, and questionable systems of occult meaning (Blake, Moore, Woodring, Vimalakirti).

If that stuff is too far off into hippie woo, to contrast with it we include one book that has something to do with my day job in software (Brooks). He was the architect of IBM's System/360, and you can't get much more straight-mainstream-rationalist than that!

And interestingly, a couple of books play around on the border between rationality and the lands beyond. Though one is fiction (Crowley) and one nonfiction (Kripal) they both are about academics who lose their faith in hardnosed rationality and materialism and end up exploring more ethereal domains.

Wow, I am really impressed with my ability to come up with post-hoc structure and rationales! Swear to (the possibly dead) god that I didn't plan any of that out! I guess the influence of the last book I blogged about is pretty obvious (in fact Kripal was Erik Davis's thesis advisor).

Here's the list. I hope to write more detailed reviews of at least some of these, and will expand or link here.

• Wittgenstein's Mistress, David Markson, 2/11
  
• The Flip, Jeffrey Kripal, 2/16
  
• The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman, 2/23
  
• Promethea v2, Alan Moore / J. H. Williams, 3/11
  
• Distraction, Bruce Sterling 4/2
  
• Congress of the Animals / Fran / Weathercraft, Jim Woodring, 4/22
  
• White Noise, Don Delillo, 5/3
  
• Why William Blake Matters, John Higgs 5/20
  
• Black Sunday, Thomas Harris 5/25
  
• Ægypt, John Crowley 6/21
  
• The Vimalakirti Sutra, tr. Robert Thurman
  
• The Design of Design, Fred Brooks, 7/14
  
• Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye
  
• Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee, 7/16
  
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, 8/2

Blogyear 2019 in Review

The blog is obviously close to death, but somehow refusing to die. Two posts this year, barely.

I՚m doing just as much thinking, and presumably have about the same level of somewhat-blogworthy ideas as I always did. But the shape of the media landscape has changed. It՚s weird because I never really thought of this blog as part of a trend or movement, but I started it when blogs got started and it died when blogging as a medium died. As someone who generally feels out of step with everything, it՚s kind of strangely pleasurable to find myself part of a wave, even if I only noticed it after the crash.

The Minsky book came out with an introduction I wrote (I got the gig on the strength of this earlier blog post), which gave me some momentary kvelling opportunities. Then shortly thereafter his name got ensnared with the Epstein/MIT sex scandals. Eeesh. (I mostly resisted commenting on this sad situation, but here՚s my thoughts).

That was a blow, and it wasn't the worst of last year, not by a long shot. It՚s been a rough one.

I՚ll close it out with some thoughts from some of the weirder neighborhoods of Twitter:

Ego is the mind overfitting to its own history.

— Sport of Brahma (@SportOfBrahma) December 24, 2019

The year is 20XX. Crime is not just legal, it is mandatory. The only currency is photographs of water and the last remaining company, Capitalism Corp, is hoarding them all. Only one man can stop them, and his name is John Motorcycle. There’s just one problem: he’s a computer.

— Emma (@emmadaboutlife) December 16, 2019

The body is the API of the soul.

— Slope of Function (@SlopeOfFunction) February 10, 2019

instead of a new year's resolution, consider articulating a new year's resignation; for example, I am resigned to the violent passage of time, the waste of my mind, the endless winter

— neotenebre (@ctrlcreep) December 31, 2019

Weird Tales from the Seventies

Erik Davis՚ recent book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies is an engaging work of cultural history, focusing on the lives and works of three important countercultural intellectuals: the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, the writer Robert Anton Wilson, and SF writer and later visionary Philip K Dick. These three psychonauts all inhabited California in the seventies, a moment when the druggy revolutionary energy of the sixties was in the process of mutating into a wild variety of spiritual practices and strange belief systems.

Davis draws a common thread through these pioneers and their stories. Aside from their obvious similarities (they shared a time and place, they were all writers, they all experimented with drugs and esoteric practices, they were all somewhat fringe figures who went on to have impacts on the mainstream culture) – they also all underwent strange experiences where fiction and reality start to bleed into each other, resulting in feelings of confusion, deep ontological crises, ambiguous spiritual revelations, and new writings that attempted to describe and understand their weird experiences. Their works began as fiction but looped back to intertwine with their real lives in unexpected and uncharacterizable ways.

This looping quality is a key aspect of the common thread that Davis identifies as high weirdness – defined variously as a textual genre, a subcultural mode; a realization of that mode at a particular time and place; a style of ironic self-reference; and a particular kind of personal quasi-religious experience. If it՚s a bit hard to pin down, that is another of its inherent qualities – it resists precise definition. But to me the most interesting aspect of it is how it starts to be a theory of how the relationship between text and reality breaks down at the extremes. As Davis puts it, they “pushed hard on the boundaries of reality – and got pushed around in return.”

Given the theme of strange loops and the structural strategy of viewing this deep and far-reaching idea through the lens of three different thinkers, it՚s hard not to think of High Weirdness as Gödel Escher Bach for acidheads. And while it isn՚t that obvious from its official presentation as a work of cultural criticism, it also shares Hofstadter՚s high ambition of capturing important but elusive glimpses of something fundamental to the structure of reality.

But where Hofstadter՚s metacircular loops tend to be orderly quasi-mathematical formal patterns, the loops of High Weirdness are subtler, stranger, and harder to pin down. They are viral and agent-like; they are darker, more personal, more like narratives than beautiful patterns. They begin as texts and but then leap off the page to enfold their authors. They take on aspects of a Landian hyperstition, a myth that has independent agency and can somehow act to call itself into being. They pose a challenge to mainstream metaphysics in a way that Hofstadter՚s more purely cognitive loops do not.

If High Weirdness is a viral construct that has a tendency to infect authors and readers, and can transmit itself by way of texts, then High Weirdness itself is a carrier. Davis is quite explicit about this, at one point comparing his text to bubble gum on the shoe, something sticky that just won՚t go away and is passed on from one carrier to the next (of course making this review another potential carrier of the infection – sorry about that! But you can blame the weirdly irresistible agency of the idea).

In other words, the book is not just a breezy biography of some colorful cultural figures, but also a quite serious attempt to absorb, synthesize, and reflect on their actual ideas and works and their broader meaning for the culture and for the nature of existence. It՚s based on genuine academic work (originally a dissertation in comparative religion) but does not patronize its somewhat disreputable subjects. It enters into their world of “garage philosophy” and their quests and connects it to more institutionalized forms of discourse. (Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton are prominent touchstones). It is a highbrow view of the lowbrow, and quite self-aware of the contradictions that generates.

Davis՚s philosophical framework for encompassing the experiences he writes about he calls “weird naturalism”: basically the position that weird things (UFOs, spirit visions, machine elves, etc) are real but not supernatural. They are not spirits from another plane of existence, but irreducible features of the one reality that we actually inhabit. Certainly the experiences they engender are real enough. One might consider them, especially given the generative role drugs play in producing them, as tricks of the nervous systems – real like an optical illusion is a real phenomenon of vision. But it՚s key to Davis՚s story that they are somehow realer than that, that they aren՚t mere hallucinations, but instead glimpses of unseen aspects of reality:

The… most substantial sense of the word is ontological. In this view, weirdness is a mode of reality, of the way things are…Weirdness here is not simply an artifact of our bent minds but a feature of the art and manner of existence itself…More than a genre, more than a psychological mode, the weird inheres in the loopy, twisty, tricksy way whereby things come to be. (p 9)

That all sounds very abstract, but one of the strengths of High Weirdness is connecting up these metaphysical speculations with the concrete details of the lives of the particular individuals involved, and with the specific cultural context they lived in. I can՚t say much about the Terence McKenna parts since I just don՚t know his work that well, but I՚ve been a big RAW and PKD fan for decades and even so there was a lot of new detail and insight into the lives and works of these author/visionaries, as well as the connections between them. I can՚t readily summarize these sections, which are dense with personal history.

RAW Illumination

But I can՚t resist saying a little bit about Robert Anton Wilson, who had an outsized influence on my own thinking. He՚s best known as co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, an underground classic that explored drugs, anarchism, cults and conspiracy theories at time when these topics were very much underground, rather than the stuff of pop culture cliche like they are today. While I was a big fan when I found these books, which would be late 70s at MIT, it՚s a little hard to read Wilson today, in part because this stuff has permeated the mainstream so thoroughly. Also, certain standards have shifted and both the sex and the epistemology, which seemed rather daring back then, are kind of dated. But that really means that he was in the vanguard of an important cultural shift.

Wilson՚s philosophy might best be encapsulated as epistemological anarchism – rather than cleaving to a single belief system, an enlightened mind had to treat belief lightly, recognizing that there are many possible conflicting belief systems that all offer something of possible value, and having a single vision is the death of thought “If one can only see things, according to one՚s own belief systems, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind”. Or in the words of the Discordian writer Malaclypse the Younger “convictions cause convicts”. Wilson himself was interested in occultism, drugs, fringe politics like anarchism and libertarianism, and fringe scientists like Timothy Leary and John Lilly. One of his minor causes was rehabilitating Wilhelm Reich and describing his “persecution” at the hands of the government for his orgone boxes.

When Wilson was writing, the idea that freakish alternative world views should be taken seriously was quite radical; today it՚s part of the cultural background assumptions. In the 60s and 70s, it might have seemed like a great idea to break free of the master narratives of mainstream culture and go seek your own truths. In the world of Trump and Fox News – well, like in so many revolutions, the outcome was not quite as liberatory as was hoped for. [I՚ve been warned all my life that I՚ll become conservative with age. It hasn՚t happened in politics for obvious reasons, but maybe I՚m becoming an epistemological conservative in my old age, looking back with a bit of embarrassment at the radical posturings of my youth.]

Davis dives into Wilson՚s career and writings, but the thematic focus is on a period in his life where he believed he was receiving transmissions from a higher intelligence from Sirius, an experience he detailed in the book Cosmic Trigger. He found himself in what he termed Chapel Perilous – a state of psychic confusion, where the synchronicities pile up and overwhelm rationality and skepticism:

Wilson awoke from a dream and scribbled down the following phrase: Sirius is important. This dream prompt, inserted like a virus into Wilson՚s already wacky weltanschauung, triggered a series of coincidences, paranormal experiences, and interlocking references that drew Wilson into what Lovecraft called “a structure of indefinite possibility and promise.” (p 246). … This “discursive network” produced for Wilson a wide variety of edifying teachings, prophecy, and gibberish.

Wilson was fully convinced that contact with an alien Higher Intelligence had begun…Wilson often slipped into what cognitive psychologists would describe as delusions of reference, confirmation bias, and off-the-hook agency detection…[he] considered the possibility of madness, but rejected the idea…

As Wilson said later, you either come out of Chapel Perilous as a stone paranoid or an epistemological agnostic. Wilson was fortunate to find the later path, due in large part to his inherent humanism and good humor. After his experience, he was able to write about it with an attitude of bemused detachment, and no firm commitment to its ontological status.

For Wilson had in many ways scripted his own extraordinary experience. Cosmic Trigger describes what happens when the sort of mischievous mindfucks that Wilson had unleashed in Illuminatus! come home to roost…unlike the many naive example of such self-scripting, Wilson was perfectly aware of the elements of “fictionality” that were shaping the “four-dimensional coincidence-hologram” his life had become. The irony was that this critical awareness did not dissolve the entities who seemed to be pulling the strings. (p 253)

Weirding the Wider World

The final section of High Weirdness attempts to trace the consequences of these writers and their experiences up to the present age, in no small part due to their influence on the technology culture of Silicon Valley and the general rise of “network culture”, which means not only the Internet but various New Age beliefs (Marilyn Ferguson՚s famous Aquarian Conspiracy apparently heralded the rise of networks as an organizing principle) and the rhizomatic epistemology of Deleuze and Guattari. This part I had a bit of trouble with. If the world is indeed shifting to a more networked and less hierarchical organization, it՚s not clear to me what the visions of three spiritual seekers had to do with it. The drivers are largely technological, and if these writers sensed the changes and incorporated them into their work they were not that unique in doing so.

There՚s also some discussion of the unavoidable fact that these concerns which used to be fringe are now rapidly becoming mainstream. Psychedelics are the stuff of bestseller self-help books, conspiracy theories are the stuff of mainstream movies. The weirdness of the world seems to have caught up or lapped the visionary experiences of the 1970s, making their struggles seem a big quaint. But High Weirdness is quite openly a work of cultural history, trying to draw a picture of the state of things in the recent past, so that is expected.

More ominously, the mindfuck media hacking techniques pioneered by the early Discordians are now industrial-strength tools of political warfare and intelligence operations, to the point where they have damaged the fundamental trustworthiness of long-standing political institutions – and not for the liberatory purposes that drove them originally.

The lesson may be that epistemic revolutions run into the same problem that plagues political revolutions: destroy the existing institutions of power, and the wrong people will rush in to fill the ensuing vacuums. The consensus reality that Wilson and others challenged seems like it might have been worth saving, after all. But this book is about a time when we were all more innocent. If some of their explorations seem foolish and embarrassing in retrospect, well, it՚s hard to imagine a more nuanced, sympathetic, and relevant attempt to retrace their steps and link it to the broader struggle to understand and improve the world.

Related posts: musings towards weird naturalism; my visit to a PKD festival. And maybe relevant if a bit a field from High Weirdness: my conflicted relationship with psychedelic culture.

On Koch and Monsters

[ this blog is pretty much comatose, but every so often my pet mission of anti-anti-politics comes up and I can't resist. ]

Some people are horrified and disgusted that people are celebrating the death of David Koch. It՚s distasteful – wasn՚t he a fellow human being, with a family and people who cared about him? And isn՚t reveling in the death of a political opponent rather extreme? Should one really wish death on people just because they hold different political views?

I think this betrays a fairly shallow view of politics. The people who say this think it՚s just some unimportant shouting game, or just a sort of intellectual disagreement. This is wrong. Politics is a cousin of war, war breeds enemies, and fuck if I don՚t want to see my enemies dead. They are, after all, trying to kill me.

This is obviously true of the Nazis, fascists, ethno-nationalists and all their enablers. These are obviously people who don՚t merely have a “difference of opinion”, they are devotees of ideologies that would murder me and my family in a heartbeat. This is not a hypothetical; their predecessors did in fact murder a huge swath of my ancestors, not that long ago.

David Koch was not a Nazi*, but he put his enormous wealth in the service of climate denial, which if you multiply everything out is probably going to do a lot more damage to humanity than the Nazis ever dreamed of. He supported a vast number of odious causes, but that one in particular seems like a direct threat to my own life and to everybody else՚s.

This is the stakes of politics in our era, and perhaps every era. Life and death. Existential struggle. It՚s not a debating society, it՚s not an intellectual game, it՚s not a club or identity, although it includes all of those as aspects.

And let՚s be clear – Koch is despised not merely for his “views”, but because he put his wealth and power into the service of promulgating those views, which conveniently were designed to help him maintain that wealth and power. He wasn՚t an intellectual; he bought the services of intellectuals by the truckload.

Sometimes I wish I were more of a doctrinaire Marxist or Foucauldian or something like that, because in cases like this the links between class interest and ideology are so painfully clear and they at least have the language to talk about it. A Marxist would have no qualms about pissing on Koch's grave, but also would not be so prone to think of him as evil -- he's simply pursuing his narrow class interests, which just happen to be opposed to mine.

Politics can be very ugly and stupid. But it's also an inescapable fact of life, and when things get hot you have to figure out what side you are on. Koch had no qualms about promoting his side, and I don՚t have qualms about being opposed to him. He did enormous damage and now he՚s gone, leaving only his family, his institutions, his hangers-on, and untold quantities of money to continue his project of making the world a worse place.

On the other hand: I՚m currently in a situation where  a recently dead person who I respected a lot is under attack by an enraged public mob. Fairly or unfairly, I can՚t say – I have very mixed feelings, the facts are still being hashed out, and I haven՚t yet been able to write about it directly. But it gives me a bit of empathy for the other side, for the people in David Koch՚s life who didn՚t see him as a monster but as a whole person. The cases aren՚t very parallel for dozens of different reasons, but in both cases you can see the machinery by which societies, or factions within society, deal with defining, judging, and punishing purportedly monstrous behavior.

There՚s something primal about this process; it seems both a necessary part of social cognition (that is, it is part of how a society constructs itself; how it establishes its rules for normalcy and deviancy) and also kind of ugly, scary, and anti-intellectual. And it doesn՚t even do a good job of suppressing monstrosity, which seems to get stronger the more it is rejected, repressed, and projected outwards.


*while he wasn՚t a Nazi, part of his fortune came from his father working for Nazi Germany and he՚s got other Nazi-adjacent items in his history, so there՚s that.

Blogyear 2018 in review

A new record low number of posts, yet this blog isn՚t quite dead.

The past year obviously sucked politically but also sucked for me on a personal level. Details don՚t belong here, but in the good news department I started a new job in October which is infinitely better than the last one. I՚m once again hacking Lisp for science which seems to be my professional destiny, one I can live with.

I had a few postings about politics in the abstract, mostly drafting off of SlateStarCodex. I still think this is an important and interesting topic but I haven՚t found a good way to talk about it. I think this is what “attracted” me to NRx writers (to their writings, not to their beliefs) – they are raising fundamental questions about the processes of group formation, social cohesion, conflict and violence. They have the right questions but the wrong answers. SSC also raises deep questions, and comes up with answers that are not as obviously wrong but still, IMO, wrong and dangerous. But the times are too fraught; trying to pick arguments in blog comment threads, which always seemed kind of dumb, is more of waste of time now than ever.

This year I rediscovered Italo Calvino and read a bunch of his books, which I highly recommend. Good places to start: If on a Winter՚s Night a Traveler (fiction and metafiction), or Six Memos for the Next Millenium (personal esthetics and philosophy).

And just yesterday the Twitter group mind seems to have founded the new field of patarationalism which I find describes what I՚ve been doing for decades, more or less.