"Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the earth." For one small creature to move the rest of creation, it would take only a fulcrum and a cosmic lever. Centuries later, stock-market speculators dreamed of parlaying small stakes into great fortunes. That would take only borrowed capital and some brilliant choices: leverage.
Now, in America, small clusters of political adepts sit atop gigantic levers whose tips they've wedged into the national brain.
An extreme case as to the smallness of the interest represented versus the greatness of the lever is the "trans lobby" that has lifted its constituency far above most others in sociopolitical salience. Larger interest groups with at least equally pressing needs for attention have got nothing like the activist network that operates ubiquitously, overbearingly, in service to people who have had a sex change. No lobby has ever succeeded in — or had the undreamt-of effect of — distorting shared reality in so many particulars or at such a fundamental level. It's been only a few years since the cultural Left expanded its standard string of epithets for the oppressors of society from "white male" to "white straight cisgender male"; but soon the radioactivity of the cisgender blighted the male (and female) and even the straight (and gay) in leading-edge public discourse. Then trans orthodoxy slipped its leash and begot non-binary orthodoxy. At this rate, the world in which we all need to function will lapse back, epistemically, into the primordial soup — in honor of a precious few.
A similar case in more condensed form is that of the Palestinian lobby. The activist network itself appears to be smaller and organizationally less substantial (though a study of its funding would be instructive); but it has made the most of its prior standing with the Left, at the same time drawing energy from Israel's recklessness in Gaza, to gain inordinate prominence in US politics. A president of the United States can neither dictate to a determined Israeli government nor abruptly sever ties with it, but American leftists absorbed in the Palestinian cause are nevertheless concentrating their anger on President Biden and other Democrats at the risk of bringing back Donald Trump and his enablers in this year's elections. As usual with activists of the Left, they think more about influence within their own collective than about the benefits of collectively controlling the government. If they prove instrumental in transferring state power to the Right, as they have proved in reviving the ancient scourge of antisemitism, it will be a dramatic consequence of leverage: a modern nation of some 340 million upended by the Palestinian interest.
The greatest case of leverage is the domestic race-based one, the one commonly condensed into the terms DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), CRT (critical race theory), BLM (Black Lives Matter), and anti-racism (meaning remedial neoracism). Here, the interest supposedly represented is larger than in the trans and Palestinian lobbies, though still just a bit over 14% of the adult population. It certainly does not amount to the combined numbers of arguably non-white people, as there is no such interest group either extant or incipient. This lobby, though it may cast its rhetorical net more broadly, is understood to claim representation of black Americans. However, even that claim is extreme. The black Americans envisaged by the small cluster of political adepts atop this lever are the black members of the cluster itself: ideologues who re-imagine the requirements and aspirations of working-class black communities as hankerings to abolish the police, to decriminalize the drug trade, and to normalize academic weakness.
The race lobby gets most of its ideological content from black academics. It gets its strength primarily from white activists and secondarily from a host of everyday white progressives anxious to lend their weight to a social-justice cause. It bestows its benefits on vigilantes, black and white, who gratify themselves by bullying the politically disfavored at DEI sessions, indoctrinating children, shaming students, or laying traps for the unwary wherever people interact. In concept, the work being done is that of "decentering": the truly Archimedean feat of dislodging the biggest part of society from its too-conspicuous position. The requisite fulcrum is the idea of white guilt, compressed into a monolith and held in place by white progressives' earnest team spirit. (In the heyday of #MeToo, progressive men would talk to each other about "taking one for the team" by enduring false accusations of sexual misconduct — which they failed to recognize as indulgent gallantry.)
However, reliance on white progressives' gallant modeling of guilt and repentance is a poor long-term strategy for the race lobby. Not only will it tend to pall on the models themselves, but the greater number of Americans who have been direct or indirect objects of the bullying, indoctrination, shaming, and trapping will lose patience. Unlike the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, which won hearts and minds by assailing unnatural barriers, the race lobby will lose them by unnaturally assailing comity. That other movement was a destined bid for justice. This one is an opportunistic scheme.
The opportunism is not solely a matter of picking up political influence in a seller's market for specious arguments (that nothing has really changed since the Jim Crow era, that white people and all their works are inherently racist, that past discrimination calls for present discrimination). The group at the public center of the race lobby, which might have risen above common special-interest activism, proceeded to sink below it. At first, the words "Black Lives Matter" were readily understood as a statement, a declaration of truth around which all people of goodwill could rally. Opinion surveys showed that a large majority of Americans responded favorably to those words. But by the second year of the "racial reckoning" that began with the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, that response had faded markedly. In the meantime, the words had hardened into a brand fraught with alienating associations; particularly the news that a flood of donations to the Black Lives Matter organization had benefited insiders even as some local chapters and families of police-violence victims complained of not receiving promised funds. Under the individual control of one remaining BLM founder, Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter Network Foundation spent nearly $6,000,000 on a 6,500-square-foot house, which it called both a campus for (apparently rare) content-production activities and a safehouse for persecuted activists. Cullors nevertheless posted videos of herself making private use of the house: cooking in its kitchen, observing the first anniversary of George Floyd's death — the end of a banner year for fund-raising — with Champagne. She resigned from the organization soon after that anniversary. Her personal acquisition of luxurious properties along the way would perhaps be no one's business but hers if her journey from working-class Marxist to purchaser of mansions made more sense.
Meanwhile, variously-affiliated activists in the Black Lives Matter movement and the greater race lobby have given themselves to the Omnicause (race, climate, Palestine, what-have-you) with the predictable result that they're seen to vanish into the throng of a progressive bazaar rather than stand as a rallying-point for racial justice. Now they must expect trust and support only from people who subscribe to all their causes instead of the larger set who subscribed to their original one. Full trust and steadfast support become unlikely in any case, since a unifying Omnicause implies commerce in some ulterior object or objects — whether socialism or anarchism or habitual activism. Grand though the race lobby is, it will disintegrate because its moral currency is bogus.
But nothing could be more certain to disintegrate than the cloud of casual epiphanies that has accumulated in the sex-and-gender space: that sex is not binary; that there's no such thing as biological sex, anyway; that a declaration of altered gender is sufficient to make it so. Among the people touting this ad hoc successor to fundamental knowledge, there's probably not one who would bet anything of value on its survival beyond the typical lifespan of a sociopolitical fad: about three years. As a challenge to established language and meaning, it's feckless. As a challenge to established science, it's in a class with Lysenkoism. This too shall pass, but not harmlessly.
The whole delirious season of leverage shall pass. And then what? If it has ended with a sigh of exhaustion, America may patiently sort out the visions from the hubris and apply bits of them to its historical work in progress. But what if it has ended with a snap? What if it has culminated in unendurable strain on a majority that knows itself to be wronged? The activist minority that yesterday propagated its will through the mass of the center-left may today find itself alone at the peak of ambition — suddenly unsupported, doomed to tumble into the maw of a reactionary beast. Sitting atop a gigantic political lever is a lot like riding a tiger.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Monday, March 4, 2024
Entrification
The time is the late 19th century. A certain Transylvanian nobleman has been busy, in the words of a certain Dutch professor, "leaving his own barren land — barren of peoples — and coming to a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn." The new land in question, multitude of corn notwithstanding, is England. It could easily be America. An immigrant to either of those modern countries could be there in quest of a new life, but Count Dracula is there in quest of new sustenance for his old life. That's another matter. New lands are under no obligation to serve ancient ends.
Now the time is the early 21st century; the time of the 2024 primary elections in the state of Michigan, USA, to be exact. A national columnist has come for the sort of coffee-shop interview in which columnists often plumb the local mind. However, his appointed interviewee is neither a local nor some common coffee-drinker, but Nihad Awad, a Palestinian-American immigrant based in Washington, DC, and National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After the massacre in southern Israel perpetrated from Gaza by Hamas last October, his public remarks on the subject ranged over hill and dale of common decency in a "catch me out if you can" manner that ended in his being caught out. The Biden administration condemned his palpable callousness and stopped cooperating with his organization.
Awad went to Michigan, where a noteworthy proportion of the population is of Arab descent, to urge a Democratic revolt against President Biden for continuing to support Israel despite its intense bombing of Gaza. That sounds pretty much like a normal campaign to influence public policy, but Awad's conversation with Charles M. Blow of The New York Times produced this:
This man's compulsion to punish at any cost and his Bronze Age patter about "my enemy" and "my friend" belong to the Mideast, not the Midwest. In a candid moment, he displayed the nihilism of his ancestral culture more than was good for an American political cause. Reader comments on the interview were preponderantly negative. Some readers deplored the language of vengeance; others expressed alarm at what they were beginning to see as the wholesale importation of a foreign feud. Both the interview and the general reaction to it should be eye-opening. Immigrants to the Land of the Free mustn't think they can make so free as to set up arrogant cultures-in-exile replete with all their ancient hatreds and morbid habits: the very plagues which many people have tried to escape by moving to America. And liberal-minded Americans ought not to believe in welcoming immigrants on the immigrants' terms. The novel form of nation that defines itself by its political ethos doesn't need demographic continuity to remain itself, but it does need continuity — which for some immigrants will mean rebirth — at the level of political ethos.
I chose to approach my subject, which I call by the disposable name of entrification, through a case that features concrete entry into the US before abstract entry into a sphere of political influence. It boasts a clear beginning, a fairly striking middle, and at least the risk of a self-inflicted end. However, entrification is not some effect of immigration. It's the change wrought in American political life by flooding all zones with entryism.
The practice known as entryism is commonly associated with 20th-century Leninist movements, whose leaders would prompt rank-and-file members to join moderate parties or politically neutral organizations for the purpose of radicalizing them from within. Today this practice is rampant on all sides, in varying degrees of calculation.
It's hardly necessary to recount how a cohort of Americans bred in the downstream shallows of Leninism has entered and then influenced news organizations, NGOs, university administrations, local governments, and the national Democratic Party. As for the Democratic Party, left-wing enthusiasts have gained such prominence in the collective mind of the news media that they're almost universally referred to as the party's "base" although they constitute a small minority well to the left of the median Democratic voter.
While "the Republican base" always refers to a numerically dominant mass of voters, it offers a study in entryism more or less loosely defined depending on the conclusion one draws from the study. The most accurate conclusion is probably the one that refers back to the Republican "Southern strategy" and related efforts to build electoral strength by pulling in socially conservative, not to say racist, voters who had little in common with the party's plutocratic establishment. After Trump — an outsider himself — personally captured those voters in the presidential campaign of 2016, he turned their subversive influence to his own advantage.
The Republican case seems pretty rough-and-ready as entryism goes; one in which a force for radicalization was carelessly introduced by the establishment itself and then harnessed to the purposes of a latter-day interloper. It's true that there's another factor to be weighed: a marked sympathy with foreign autocrats and particularly with Russia's Vladimir Putin. At this writing, a powerful faction of congressional Republicans is blocking military aid to Ukraine, much to Putin's advantage. Meanwhile, Trump has conspicuously refrained from holding Putin responsible for the death in captivity of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny. Trump has long been accused, without substantiation, of being in Putin's power. If he is, the Republican case suddenly becomes one of entryism in the extreme. However, a conscientious weighing of available evidence tends to the conclusion that Trump and his ilk simply like autocrats. They're probably not foreign agents, but rebels without a plan. Either way, they've taken over a major political party and started using it to wreak havoc. They're filling in part of a national pattern of entrification.
American parties and institutions that ought to steady the life of a democratic republic are now scenes of anarchic disruption from within. Cannon to the right of us, cannon to the left of us volley and thunder from captured heights. And in front of us, figures loom out of antiquity heralding nihilism. That, at least, must be thrown back.
Now the time is the early 21st century; the time of the 2024 primary elections in the state of Michigan, USA, to be exact. A national columnist has come for the sort of coffee-shop interview in which columnists often plumb the local mind. However, his appointed interviewee is neither a local nor some common coffee-drinker, but Nihad Awad, a Palestinian-American immigrant based in Washington, DC, and National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After the massacre in southern Israel perpetrated from Gaza by Hamas last October, his public remarks on the subject ranged over hill and dale of common decency in a "catch me out if you can" manner that ended in his being caught out. The Biden administration condemned his palpable callousness and stopped cooperating with his organization.
Awad went to Michigan, where a noteworthy proportion of the population is of Arab descent, to urge a Democratic revolt against President Biden for continuing to support Israel despite its intense bombing of Gaza. That sounds pretty much like a normal campaign to influence public policy, but Awad's conversation with Charles M. Blow of The New York Times produced this:
He doesn't only want Biden to be politically corrected; he wants him politically crushed.
...
Awad said he doesn't like Trump and doesn't welcome a second Trump term, but he's prepared to accept that outcome for the sake of punishing Biden. "I'm going to live under Trump, because I survived under Trump, because he's my enemy," he says. "I cannot live under someone who pretends to be my friend."
This man's compulsion to punish at any cost and his Bronze Age patter about "my enemy" and "my friend" belong to the Mideast, not the Midwest. In a candid moment, he displayed the nihilism of his ancestral culture more than was good for an American political cause. Reader comments on the interview were preponderantly negative. Some readers deplored the language of vengeance; others expressed alarm at what they were beginning to see as the wholesale importation of a foreign feud. Both the interview and the general reaction to it should be eye-opening. Immigrants to the Land of the Free mustn't think they can make so free as to set up arrogant cultures-in-exile replete with all their ancient hatreds and morbid habits: the very plagues which many people have tried to escape by moving to America. And liberal-minded Americans ought not to believe in welcoming immigrants on the immigrants' terms. The novel form of nation that defines itself by its political ethos doesn't need demographic continuity to remain itself, but it does need continuity — which for some immigrants will mean rebirth — at the level of political ethos.
I chose to approach my subject, which I call by the disposable name of entrification, through a case that features concrete entry into the US before abstract entry into a sphere of political influence. It boasts a clear beginning, a fairly striking middle, and at least the risk of a self-inflicted end. However, entrification is not some effect of immigration. It's the change wrought in American political life by flooding all zones with entryism.
The practice known as entryism is commonly associated with 20th-century Leninist movements, whose leaders would prompt rank-and-file members to join moderate parties or politically neutral organizations for the purpose of radicalizing them from within. Today this practice is rampant on all sides, in varying degrees of calculation.
It's hardly necessary to recount how a cohort of Americans bred in the downstream shallows of Leninism has entered and then influenced news organizations, NGOs, university administrations, local governments, and the national Democratic Party. As for the Democratic Party, left-wing enthusiasts have gained such prominence in the collective mind of the news media that they're almost universally referred to as the party's "base" although they constitute a small minority well to the left of the median Democratic voter.
While "the Republican base" always refers to a numerically dominant mass of voters, it offers a study in entryism more or less loosely defined depending on the conclusion one draws from the study. The most accurate conclusion is probably the one that refers back to the Republican "Southern strategy" and related efforts to build electoral strength by pulling in socially conservative, not to say racist, voters who had little in common with the party's plutocratic establishment. After Trump — an outsider himself — personally captured those voters in the presidential campaign of 2016, he turned their subversive influence to his own advantage.
The Republican case seems pretty rough-and-ready as entryism goes; one in which a force for radicalization was carelessly introduced by the establishment itself and then harnessed to the purposes of a latter-day interloper. It's true that there's another factor to be weighed: a marked sympathy with foreign autocrats and particularly with Russia's Vladimir Putin. At this writing, a powerful faction of congressional Republicans is blocking military aid to Ukraine, much to Putin's advantage. Meanwhile, Trump has conspicuously refrained from holding Putin responsible for the death in captivity of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny. Trump has long been accused, without substantiation, of being in Putin's power. If he is, the Republican case suddenly becomes one of entryism in the extreme. However, a conscientious weighing of available evidence tends to the conclusion that Trump and his ilk simply like autocrats. They're probably not foreign agents, but rebels without a plan. Either way, they've taken over a major political party and started using it to wreak havoc. They're filling in part of a national pattern of entrification.
American parties and institutions that ought to steady the life of a democratic republic are now scenes of anarchic disruption from within. Cannon to the right of us, cannon to the left of us volley and thunder from captured heights. And in front of us, figures loom out of antiquity heralding nihilism. That, at least, must be thrown back.
Thursday, December 14, 2023
Scrooge and Shelley
I revert now to my lymphoma because I've locked horns with a cold virus despite an inappropriate number of white blood cells. (The cell count and the cancer marker have been creeping up for some time.) The family doctor knows about my underlying condition, and the specialist, when apprised of the details, said I should be all right.
Let it be understood that they both take quite a serious interest in my wellbeing. My current hematologist is a young man whose careworn heart sometimes shows through his professional composure in a way which I count to his credit. One day when I sat down for my periodic test results, I found him looking distinctly weary. When I mentioned it, he confided that a case had not gone well; that this sort of thing was to be expected in his line of work, but still.... Of course there was no more that he could say to me. As for my own case, the numbers were food for thought but not overly so. He'd see me again in three months.
Several quarters have gone by since then. Has it been a full year? Now, with the data gaining on me in gently rising waves, we entertain the idea of resuming treatment — or not, if it seems that, all things considered, it's not imperative. The last such conversation included my doctor daughter, who had gone along for the purpose of getting up to date on my case.
Then I caught a November cold that is now a December one. It occurs to me that I've never kept a cold so long since an occasion in my single life when I was foolishly bent on "just getting through" one without proper care or even heating. This time, the care and the heating are top-notch and yet the family doctor's reinforced prescriptions seem to drag me up a grade by small degrees. My capacity for just getting through, which nicely complemented my folly for so long, has become a thing of the past. I don't really doubt that I'll get over this cold and be all right till some later date. However, at the season of the year when a Victorian miser might be prompted to snarl about reducing the surplus population and we ourselves see a world plunged in cruelty and violence, it feels less morose than usual to muse a while on natural death.
The English language, not atypically among modern languages, causes us to speak of "being" dead. We say, for example, "when I'm dead," which seems to mean that death is a state and that one will someday exist in that state. We may claim that when we say dead we mean non-existent, but the I and the am make a counter-claim. When Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by proving to us that Jacob Marley "was as dead as a door-nail," he succeeds only in establishing Marley's inertness; not his nihility. Sure enough, the essence of the man presently comes calling.
How hard, really, should we try to purge every suggestion of persistent "being" from our speech and thought? By my own lights, I'm a Christian. That's an audacious way to frame a confession of faith, but it's a fact: there are Christians, and there are Christians. I must say I don't expect to wake up after death and find myself lounging on a cloud or strolling through some underpopulated meadow. I'd be surprised to find myself at all. What I expect is to be utterly transmuted for the remainder of a long cosmic journey. That idea of transmutation, whether accurate or not, is a screen through which the thinking I can never pass. And God? God I conceive to be constitutive wisdom and beckoning goodness, a spirit seen as in a glass darkly but also glimpsed in the light that
The author of those lines, Percy Bysshe Shelley, gained a reputation for irreligious thought early in life, when he and a friend were expelled from Oxford for issuing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He continued to call himself an atheist and might even have shrugged if told how his dissent from religion was to be simplified and amplified in years to come. However, the briskly materialist atheists who have claimed Shelley as one of their own would not have produced his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (quoted above) or anything like this:
There are atheists, and there are atheists. It seems that Shelley's revolt was against organized religion and the anthropomorphic notion of God as the central figure in a creation myth — which is, after all, a human conceit.
Ebenezer Scrooge (surrogate for Dickens's predominantly Christian readership) listens to Marley's ghost speak in terms of humble Christian charity. We receive essentially the same urging from Shelley, who ends his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" with nothing less than a prayer:
A spirit that binds you to fear yourself and love all humankind can be adored as intellectual beauty, but it cannot be reduced to intellect. It must be a beautiful something suspended in the intellect. Shelley doesn't differentiate that thing from the divine. Rather, he overcomes the error of thinking we see the divine in what amounts to a superior sort of graven image, an idealized humanoid projection. Religion can meet the poet on common ground by supposing individual sentience to be a lens that focuses the pervading universal Spirit with various results. His poem does impart the two most vital religious teachings, snatched from the fire of idolatry. There's no call to be scandalized by that. And to claim that the gravity of the teachings owes nothing to a sense of the divine would be disingenuous.
As I was saying, I don't expect to find my I still functioning after death. For that matter, even Marley's ghost promises no such futurity to Ebenezer Scrooge. He frightens Scrooge with a vision of life misspent and oblivion denied; the implicit alternative being life well spent and oblivion granted. That's all right. It's a pleasure to think the world will keep turning and the universe will keep doing whatever it does, with the little fillip of conjecture that one pure grain of me will be gathered in and borne swiftly on.
It's taken several days to write this, but it will take more of them to cure the cold. My body's resilience has lost the old snap. I am getting better, though, and don't doubt that before long I'll again be my ageless self tramping the countryside with my equally ageless wife. Like a child, I feel indestructible at those times when I'm not feeling rotten. I fully expect to write again. Still, mindful that the statement "There's always a next time" is not strictly true, I'll take this occasion to say that my life has been a richly blessed one that led me to the politics — and, come to think of it, the theology — of gratitude. Being part of the world is a great gift.
When death does come, I'll try to take it well. You who remain will please feel bound to fear yourself, and love all humankind.
Let it be understood that they both take quite a serious interest in my wellbeing. My current hematologist is a young man whose careworn heart sometimes shows through his professional composure in a way which I count to his credit. One day when I sat down for my periodic test results, I found him looking distinctly weary. When I mentioned it, he confided that a case had not gone well; that this sort of thing was to be expected in his line of work, but still.... Of course there was no more that he could say to me. As for my own case, the numbers were food for thought but not overly so. He'd see me again in three months.
Several quarters have gone by since then. Has it been a full year? Now, with the data gaining on me in gently rising waves, we entertain the idea of resuming treatment — or not, if it seems that, all things considered, it's not imperative. The last such conversation included my doctor daughter, who had gone along for the purpose of getting up to date on my case.
Then I caught a November cold that is now a December one. It occurs to me that I've never kept a cold so long since an occasion in my single life when I was foolishly bent on "just getting through" one without proper care or even heating. This time, the care and the heating are top-notch and yet the family doctor's reinforced prescriptions seem to drag me up a grade by small degrees. My capacity for just getting through, which nicely complemented my folly for so long, has become a thing of the past. I don't really doubt that I'll get over this cold and be all right till some later date. However, at the season of the year when a Victorian miser might be prompted to snarl about reducing the surplus population and we ourselves see a world plunged in cruelty and violence, it feels less morose than usual to muse a while on natural death.
The English language, not atypically among modern languages, causes us to speak of "being" dead. We say, for example, "when I'm dead," which seems to mean that death is a state and that one will someday exist in that state. We may claim that when we say dead we mean non-existent, but the I and the am make a counter-claim. When Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by proving to us that Jacob Marley "was as dead as a door-nail," he succeeds only in establishing Marley's inertness; not his nihility. Sure enough, the essence of the man presently comes calling.
How hard, really, should we try to purge every suggestion of persistent "being" from our speech and thought? By my own lights, I'm a Christian. That's an audacious way to frame a confession of faith, but it's a fact: there are Christians, and there are Christians. I must say I don't expect to wake up after death and find myself lounging on a cloud or strolling through some underpopulated meadow. I'd be surprised to find myself at all. What I expect is to be utterly transmuted for the remainder of a long cosmic journey. That idea of transmutation, whether accurate or not, is a screen through which the thinking I can never pass. And God? God I conceive to be constitutive wisdom and beckoning goodness, a spirit seen as in a glass darkly but also glimpsed in the light that
like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
The author of those lines, Percy Bysshe Shelley, gained a reputation for irreligious thought early in life, when he and a friend were expelled from Oxford for issuing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He continued to call himself an atheist and might even have shrugged if told how his dissent from religion was to be simplified and amplified in years to come. However, the briskly materialist atheists who have claimed Shelley as one of their own would not have produced his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (quoted above) or anything like this:
There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
— Note on Queen Mab, published two years after The Necessity of Atheism
There are atheists, and there are atheists. It seems that Shelley's revolt was against organized religion and the anthropomorphic notion of God as the central figure in a creation myth — which is, after all, a human conceit.
Ebenezer Scrooge (surrogate for Dickens's predominantly Christian readership) listens to Marley's ghost speak in terms of humble Christian charity. We receive essentially the same urging from Shelley, who ends his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" with nothing less than a prayer:
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
A spirit that binds you to fear yourself and love all humankind can be adored as intellectual beauty, but it cannot be reduced to intellect. It must be a beautiful something suspended in the intellect. Shelley doesn't differentiate that thing from the divine. Rather, he overcomes the error of thinking we see the divine in what amounts to a superior sort of graven image, an idealized humanoid projection. Religion can meet the poet on common ground by supposing individual sentience to be a lens that focuses the pervading universal Spirit with various results. His poem does impart the two most vital religious teachings, snatched from the fire of idolatry. There's no call to be scandalized by that. And to claim that the gravity of the teachings owes nothing to a sense of the divine would be disingenuous.
As I was saying, I don't expect to find my I still functioning after death. For that matter, even Marley's ghost promises no such futurity to Ebenezer Scrooge. He frightens Scrooge with a vision of life misspent and oblivion denied; the implicit alternative being life well spent and oblivion granted. That's all right. It's a pleasure to think the world will keep turning and the universe will keep doing whatever it does, with the little fillip of conjecture that one pure grain of me will be gathered in and borne swiftly on.
It's taken several days to write this, but it will take more of them to cure the cold. My body's resilience has lost the old snap. I am getting better, though, and don't doubt that before long I'll again be my ageless self tramping the countryside with my equally ageless wife. Like a child, I feel indestructible at those times when I'm not feeling rotten. I fully expect to write again. Still, mindful that the statement "There's always a next time" is not strictly true, I'll take this occasion to say that my life has been a richly blessed one that led me to the politics — and, come to think of it, the theology — of gratitude. Being part of the world is a great gift.
When death does come, I'll try to take it well. You who remain will please feel bound to fear yourself, and love all humankind.
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Savagery
More than 1,300 innocent Israelis killed, including at least thirty-one American citizens, by the terrorist group Hamas. Hundreds — hundreds of young people at a music festival of — the festival was for peace — for peace — gunned down as they ran for their lives. Scores of innocents — from infants to elderly grandparents, Israelis and Americans — taken hostage. Children slaughtered. Babies slaughtered. Entire families massacred. Rape, beheadings, bodies burned alive. Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period.
— President Biden in remarks from Tel Aviv (October 18, 2023)
Here is the last circle of depravity: the slaughter of children. Infants. At this writing, the details of their slaughter are being disputed the way straws are grasped at, but the fact of it remains. Imagine what they must have felt — bewildered innocents in the hands of savage throwbacks. Yet within twenty-four hours, the mentality of the savage throwback had announced itself far and wide across the modern world. In some of the less modern precincts, ill-fitting enlightenment gave way to comfortable darkness. In exceedingly modern precincts, the civilized person's transcendent abhorrence of infanticide was overtopped by political fervor.
Many of our peers worldwide have expressed strong opposition to Hamas's attack and have offered unambiguous support for its victims. Prominent voices in the Arab world, too, have made it clear that there is no justification for sadistic murder of innocent people. However, to our dismay, some elements within the global left, individuals who were, until now, our political partners, have reacted with indifference to these horrific events and sometimes even justified Hamas's actions.
— Statement on Behalf of Israel-based Progressives and Peace Activists Regarding Debates over Recent Events in Our Region (October 16, 2023)
Western civilization has its liberals. It has its progressives, of whom I am one. And then there is the Left, too great of brain for civilization to compass. If you're not of the Left, or if you are of it but still in possession of your humanity, please don't trouble yourself to read on. What follows is addressed to those who carry water for jihadists.
❖
Since October 7, 2023, you've backed up sadistic fiends with the catchphrase, "by any means necessary." A wanton phrase. Before using words like means and necessary in reference to the slaughter of innocents, better call home and consult those who've known you all your life. There must have been a time when you wouldn't have believed you'd ever hear yourself say that killing babies was a necessary means to any end under the sun. This is not a subject on which decent human beings, be they ever so worldly, consider the context. What happened? Let's put our Gentile heads together and go through the explanations and contributing factors that come to mind.
First we need to account for the Left's inordinate interest in Palestinians as compared with Uyghurs or Armenians or the black population in Darfur. Mary Harrington lays her finger on the central piece of the puzzle, a certain blind spot:
And the size and ubiquity of this blind spot on the Left is best explained not by hatred of Jews (or not only by such hatred), but by the outsized symbolic role Israel plays as a proxy for American geopolitical hegemony.
For a Left animated by the old clockwork of Leninist aims and tactics, a focus on the Palestinians has not only the positive virtue of feeding into anti-American agitation, but also the negative virtue of not feeding into agitation against communist China or against the Muslim oppressors of blacks in Darfur (which would disturb the useful illusion of Muslim-black solidarity). That explains the political basis of the Left's absorption in the Palestinian cause, but it leaves us far from explaining how you came to care more about your politics than about the lives of children. For comparison, note that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez instantly knew the order of importance and declared, "I condemn Hamas' attack in the strongest possible terms." We must search on.
Was it runaway allyship? In the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when innocent Muslims in the US suffered acts of violence and bigotry, liberals (including many Jews) stood with them. It was essentially a principled stand, reinforced by compassion, against the particular wrong of blaming people who were innocent of a particular crime. However, those inclined to a reductive worldview for one reason or another chose to cut the Gordian knot of ethics and become unconditionally pro-Muslim. As I've written before, Donald Trump's antipathy to Muslims in later years set the seal on their standing with progressives. If Trump was against them, progressives would be for them — in toto.
The potential for doting allyship is strong in people who fancy that creature comforts have drained them of primal virtue (though it was lacking in the first place). The greater the comforts, the stronger the narcissistic sense of moral crisis requiring a baptism at the hands of the less privileged. For Americans, that means people who come from almost anywhere else but especially from places not touched by progress with a heavy hand. And for elite liberal Americans, no penance quite compares to the charade of sitting at the feet of an Old World guru; someone who is supposed to combine the virtue of the noble savage with the wisdom of the ages. One dreamily forgets that Old World people are not better known for timeless wisdom and virtue than for timeless prejudice and habit.
On an American university campus, Palestinian and other Muslim students are relatively likely to be the children of immigrants, if not immigrants themselves. If so, they're entitled to that goodwill which you extend to everyone at first, but not to any special respect or credence or solidarity. You're doing enough when you credit them with being free of Old World hatreds. Should they show that they're not, then don't drink the political brew they offer you. An exotic bigot is as bad as a domestic one.
Are you caught up in the savagery of a really polarized American body politic? Or the savagery of a seemingly polarized one? A recent paper by Rachel Kleinfeld from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports the latest of multiple findings that the general population of the US is not fundamentally polarized, but is beleaguered by politicians who strive to whip up a sense of polarization — and by the media (social and otherwise) to which this fuss is a stock in trade.
American voters are less ideologically polarized than they think they are, and that misperception is greatest for the most politically engaged people.
Kleinfeld goes on to note the reality of "affective polarization": a dislike of people on the other side of the partisan divide that's grounded in emotion, not ideological incompatibility. This emotion comes as no surprise when people have been taught to believe in underlying incompatibility. The finding that the most politically engaged people, including activists, are the most vulnerable to the misperception may be surprising until we reflect on the human tendency to exalt one's own endeavors. Political struggle is bound to be more satisfying when you think it's a population-wide clash of ideologies than when you don't.
A relentless, apocalyptic polarization scare not only keeps emotions high but also intensifies the "ammunition logic" whereby you anathematize the mention of any inconvenient truth for fear of loading the enemy's cannon. This logic, on a more coldly calculating plane, has a long history. In 1977, Noam Chomsky used his influence among progressives to inhibit early reporting and discussion of the Khmer Rouge genocide in The New York Review of Books. His apparent concern was that such reporting served the interests of the US administration and damaged the socialist cause. The magnitude of the atrocities couldn't be covered up for long; it was monstrous news that would outrage decent people everywhere; but Chomsky and those who followed his lead could, he reasoned, be good progressives by downplaying it. In today's political environment, the numbers of coldly calculating manipulators are augmented by many anxious true believers. Is that where you come in?
The decision to set aside your humanity for the benefit of Hamas may have needed no other driving force, but I suspect there was a big one: the game of progressive advocacy.
The principle of rolling competition animates everything. Academics will of course leapfrog to the ideological forefront opportunely. Activists will elbow their way into the vanguard of agitation. Lesser beings will vie to retail new conceits at their freshest. Still lesser ones in spirit or political acumen will scramble to stay abreast of attitudes that can keep them in the swim, bobbing safely on the waves.
Technology is the mother of degeneration. The comparatively sluggish world-changers of the twentieth century were different in themselves, but it probably matters more that they differed in their opportunities. Who, being constantly in touch with a multitude of other people, would not fall prey to an exaggerated sense of collective destiny and a concomitant dread of personal irrelevance? The feeling that a day mustn't go by without some new proof of revolutionary vigor belongs to an age of constant communication.
This competitive game began in earnest during the #MeToo boom, with a bidding-up of support that culminated in the supremely reductive "Believe women." Once that had been said, no one who wished to stay relevant as a pro-feminist progressive could afford to say less. Perhaps you find that, today, one can't say less than "From the river to the sea ... by any means necessary" and stay relevant in certain circles.
There's nothing wrong with becoming irrelevant there. The circles themselves are drawn in shifting sand, but your humanity is forever.
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Benighted!
Have you read Dracula three times? I have. It's a quaintly clumsy work, but when it summons me I must go.
Have you watched Bride of Frankenstein (1935) more times than you can remember? I have. It's a wonderful film, an acknowledged classic which many people over the years have probably skipped on account of the title. All silver and shadow, and civilized horrors graced with wit.
I've always felt the pull of the uncanny. A teenage fling with a Ouija board disconcerted my favorite teacher, who apparently had thought I had more sense. About the same time, I took a rapt interest in strange phenomena that "could only be" extraterrestrial spacecraft and acquainted myself with some of the literature on that subject. One or two of the other kids were all-out UFO buffs who talked as though they had special knowledge of alien technology, but I viewed them as poseurs.
Later came a more respectable curiosity about extrasensory perception. In remembrance of the days when I pursued the uncanny outside of books and movies, I've kept a pack of ESP cards developed in the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University. I met J. B. and Louisa Rhine themselves and interviewed them for radio as professionally as can be expected when the interviewer is star-struck.
One summer evening, three young men set out to investigate the paranormal phenomenon of a light that was said to appear over a certain remote stretch of railroad track, the scene of a nineteenth-century train wreck. It did appear. Some light did, at any rate. However, as it seemed to be very far off, and as the only approach was along the dark track with its plague of freight trains, we wrapped up our investigation at the crossing and went home. Our empirical evidence was compromised by the fact that although the pinpoint of light showed up in photographs, nothing else did. Still, I was satisfied that the fun we'd had on that lark was all that anyone could have had.
Now I dimly perceived what I had always felt, that the value of fantastic notions lay in the fun to be had with them. As I lost the capacity for half-belief in the supernatural, I laid hold of something I need never part with: a taste for it. The chill darkness of late October in North America would be the same without the tradition of Halloween, but the tradition fills it with pleasures made possible first by wide-eyed belief, then by furtive half-belief, and at last by the luxurious suspension of disbelief. With that, the Halloween aesthetic carries everything before it.
The atmosphere of Bride of Frankenstein is consistent with the Halloween aesthetic, though it has nothing to do with the celebration. Bram Stoker's novel Dracula partakes of that aesthetic in certain details, but there's something else that lifts it above its defects and higher, to the threshold of literature: the corruption of reality. For example, the diurnal rhythms that lull us in God-governed nature take on alarming significance under the profane influence of the vampire. Then, as Stoker's protagonists make a study of those rhythms and of other unnatural laws governing the vampire's actions, they build up a dark science replete with a typed compilation of notes and transcribed voice memos (using the actual technology of the 1890s) to guide them in destroying him. They learn the secrets of dusk and dawn and the time just before dawn when the vampire is in mental communication with his helpless servant; and they lay a plan to use that knowledge against him. They learn to estimate the time when they're safe and to foresee the time when they must act at the risk of their lives and souls. Stoker has them set the story down by turns in their own words. This peripatetic chronicle — water-lapped and sun-streaked, now calm and now urgent, about a little band of moderns coming to grips with a curse made flesh — is peculiarly hypnotic.
When fiction takes another step back from credulity without escaping it, we get the kind of supernatural fun I like best. A choice example is Dorothy Macardle's The Uninvited (originally Uneasy Freehold). Here, sophistication asserts itself outright.
When strange things begin to happen, and psychology must stand as a barrier against superstition, we find that psychology is itself adrift.
The pleading of invisible forces just this side of spirits by the novel's voice of reason is not a lapse, but a shift. It marks the permissive intellectual setting in which we're invited to enjoy what we couldn't enjoy in a well-ordered one: a genuine ghost story. Macardle's supernatural fiction is of that genre in which abundantly literate people may speak of "the true medium" as opposed to the many charlatans, or adduce one paranormal claim in support of another with moves like "After all, it's known that...," and always be taken seriously.
A fictional world infused with erudite credulity is a happy place for a lark, I think. However, the reactions of society's gatekeepers to the 1944 film adaptation of Macardle's novel were decidedly mixed on that point. The film was well received as a whole. It's thoroughly civilized entertainment that builds suspense with things like a planchette séance. It gives us just a couple of brief looks (and even those against the director's preference for suggestion) at a nebulously ghostly face in the dark. Nevertheless, in 1944 it provoked questions about the advisability of treating ghosts as real in a basically serious film and of depicting one so convincingly to boot. Among the many critics who found the film genuinely scary was James Agee, who approvingly wrote, "I experienced thirty-five first-class jolts." Most viewers today would be hard pressed to feel anything so rough as a jolt, but the ghost effect was actually excised from the first British release.
Years later our children were exposed to The Uninvited, along with Astaire-Rogers musicals and other old movies, at an early age. They loved it, ghost and all. They were choosing it to re-watch almost before they had mastered the name of Edward Everett Horton (whom they also loved). Now, that's a puzzle. These children didn't bat an eye at things that had once struck sophisticated adults as frightful, but it can't have been due to changing times. After all, babies in every time and place are born into a culture-free personal world and proceed to acquire cultural tastes and tolerances from scratch. It's not as if our children could have become jaded in the modern womb; and they hadn't been immersed in harrowing sights since birth.
It seems that we find a thing shocking in entertainment because we've learned to expect certain circumscriptions, and then something violates them. Our reaction (and mine is intense) against shows of make-believe slaughter is not a reaction against violence, but against the jostling of our long-nurtured sensibilities. Certainly a realistic simulation of violence or pitiless cruelty can be horrifying in any case, but the premise of make-believe makes a crucial qualitative difference in the horror. Our children knew they were watching make-believe and watched it in a largely unconditioned state. A bit of ectoplasm didn't register above the "spooky fun" level on the make-believe scale of horror, though I'm sure it would have given them a nasty turn if they'd run into it on the way to the bathroom. Anyway, they didn't grow up to be callous members of society or disturbed personalities.
I must admit I fled the contemporary horror scene before the children were born, when the scales tipped from gothic to gory. Other moviegoers went on being conditioned, and before long I found that many didn't even get why the term horror was applied to the Universal classics of the 1930s, which I love for their eerie aesthetic and their immanent civility.
For me the silver and shadow. Place me in the company of people who know better than to believe in the supernatural but who come to believe all the same, perhaps led by some sort of professor who understands these matters nearly as well as the hobgoblins themselves. Lower the lights and raise the wind. Then send in the spirits. And, please, let it be fiction.
Have you watched Bride of Frankenstein (1935) more times than you can remember? I have. It's a wonderful film, an acknowledged classic which many people over the years have probably skipped on account of the title. All silver and shadow, and civilized horrors graced with wit.
I've always felt the pull of the uncanny. A teenage fling with a Ouija board disconcerted my favorite teacher, who apparently had thought I had more sense. About the same time, I took a rapt interest in strange phenomena that "could only be" extraterrestrial spacecraft and acquainted myself with some of the literature on that subject. One or two of the other kids were all-out UFO buffs who talked as though they had special knowledge of alien technology, but I viewed them as poseurs.
Later came a more respectable curiosity about extrasensory perception. In remembrance of the days when I pursued the uncanny outside of books and movies, I've kept a pack of ESP cards developed in the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University. I met J. B. and Louisa Rhine themselves and interviewed them for radio as professionally as can be expected when the interviewer is star-struck.
One summer evening, three young men set out to investigate the paranormal phenomenon of a light that was said to appear over a certain remote stretch of railroad track, the scene of a nineteenth-century train wreck. It did appear. Some light did, at any rate. However, as it seemed to be very far off, and as the only approach was along the dark track with its plague of freight trains, we wrapped up our investigation at the crossing and went home. Our empirical evidence was compromised by the fact that although the pinpoint of light showed up in photographs, nothing else did. Still, I was satisfied that the fun we'd had on that lark was all that anyone could have had.
Now I dimly perceived what I had always felt, that the value of fantastic notions lay in the fun to be had with them. As I lost the capacity for half-belief in the supernatural, I laid hold of something I need never part with: a taste for it. The chill darkness of late October in North America would be the same without the tradition of Halloween, but the tradition fills it with pleasures made possible first by wide-eyed belief, then by furtive half-belief, and at last by the luxurious suspension of disbelief. With that, the Halloween aesthetic carries everything before it.
The atmosphere of Bride of Frankenstein is consistent with the Halloween aesthetic, though it has nothing to do with the celebration. Bram Stoker's novel Dracula partakes of that aesthetic in certain details, but there's something else that lifts it above its defects and higher, to the threshold of literature: the corruption of reality. For example, the diurnal rhythms that lull us in God-governed nature take on alarming significance under the profane influence of the vampire. Then, as Stoker's protagonists make a study of those rhythms and of other unnatural laws governing the vampire's actions, they build up a dark science replete with a typed compilation of notes and transcribed voice memos (using the actual technology of the 1890s) to guide them in destroying him. They learn the secrets of dusk and dawn and the time just before dawn when the vampire is in mental communication with his helpless servant; and they lay a plan to use that knowledge against him. They learn to estimate the time when they're safe and to foresee the time when they must act at the risk of their lives and souls. Stoker has them set the story down by turns in their own words. This peripatetic chronicle — water-lapped and sun-streaked, now calm and now urgent, about a little band of moderns coming to grips with a curse made flesh — is peculiarly hypnotic.
When fiction takes another step back from credulity without escaping it, we get the kind of supernatural fun I like best. A choice example is Dorothy Macardle's The Uninvited (originally Uneasy Freehold). Here, sophistication asserts itself outright.
While the rest danced a foxtrot I stood with her in the door of the greenhouse, telling her the stories of my friends. And, in the telling, what vital, gifted, dramatic individuals they became! And so they were; so were Pamela and I, myself: we were free, clever, friendly, and fortunate people, living changeful, progressive lives....
When strange things begin to happen, and psychology must stand as a barrier against superstition, we find that psychology is itself adrift.
She was obstinate: "I feel that there are spirits in the place, Roddy. I can't put up a case against you, but it is what I believe."
"Well, what I believe is that the place is saturated with passions and emotions, inexpungeable misery and despair, so that no sensitive person can be in it and not be overcome by hallucinations or depression or both."
The pleading of invisible forces just this side of spirits by the novel's voice of reason is not a lapse, but a shift. It marks the permissive intellectual setting in which we're invited to enjoy what we couldn't enjoy in a well-ordered one: a genuine ghost story. Macardle's supernatural fiction is of that genre in which abundantly literate people may speak of "the true medium" as opposed to the many charlatans, or adduce one paranormal claim in support of another with moves like "After all, it's known that...," and always be taken seriously.
A fictional world infused with erudite credulity is a happy place for a lark, I think. However, the reactions of society's gatekeepers to the 1944 film adaptation of Macardle's novel were decidedly mixed on that point. The film was well received as a whole. It's thoroughly civilized entertainment that builds suspense with things like a planchette séance. It gives us just a couple of brief looks (and even those against the director's preference for suggestion) at a nebulously ghostly face in the dark. Nevertheless, in 1944 it provoked questions about the advisability of treating ghosts as real in a basically serious film and of depicting one so convincingly to boot. Among the many critics who found the film genuinely scary was James Agee, who approvingly wrote, "I experienced thirty-five first-class jolts." Most viewers today would be hard pressed to feel anything so rough as a jolt, but the ghost effect was actually excised from the first British release.
Years later our children were exposed to The Uninvited, along with Astaire-Rogers musicals and other old movies, at an early age. They loved it, ghost and all. They were choosing it to re-watch almost before they had mastered the name of Edward Everett Horton (whom they also loved). Now, that's a puzzle. These children didn't bat an eye at things that had once struck sophisticated adults as frightful, but it can't have been due to changing times. After all, babies in every time and place are born into a culture-free personal world and proceed to acquire cultural tastes and tolerances from scratch. It's not as if our children could have become jaded in the modern womb; and they hadn't been immersed in harrowing sights since birth.
It seems that we find a thing shocking in entertainment because we've learned to expect certain circumscriptions, and then something violates them. Our reaction (and mine is intense) against shows of make-believe slaughter is not a reaction against violence, but against the jostling of our long-nurtured sensibilities. Certainly a realistic simulation of violence or pitiless cruelty can be horrifying in any case, but the premise of make-believe makes a crucial qualitative difference in the horror. Our children knew they were watching make-believe and watched it in a largely unconditioned state. A bit of ectoplasm didn't register above the "spooky fun" level on the make-believe scale of horror, though I'm sure it would have given them a nasty turn if they'd run into it on the way to the bathroom. Anyway, they didn't grow up to be callous members of society or disturbed personalities.
I must admit I fled the contemporary horror scene before the children were born, when the scales tipped from gothic to gory. Other moviegoers went on being conditioned, and before long I found that many didn't even get why the term horror was applied to the Universal classics of the 1930s, which I love for their eerie aesthetic and their immanent civility.
For me the silver and shadow. Place me in the company of people who know better than to believe in the supernatural but who come to believe all the same, perhaps led by some sort of professor who understands these matters nearly as well as the hobgoblins themselves. Lower the lights and raise the wind. Then send in the spirits. And, please, let it be fiction.
Friday, October 6, 2023
Breeding Will Out
It would be nice to see the day when the name progressive fits like a pair of old shoes on Americans who just desire things like a robust welfare state, a post-racial society, and various other steps forward without getting into ideology.
Conservatives are not much troubled by ideology, since there can be only so many competing visions among people who wish to keep things as they are. The right, as always, prizes conformity to established values. The left, as never before, prizes conformity to the values of the moment. It rewards people who can bring forth new wisdom to be made conventional, couched in new terms befitting a law unto itself. That is to say, it provides a living to intellectuals. Conservatism has its intellectuals, but they serve mainly as a Greek chorus to the tragedy of change. Conservative-minded Americans know what they like without consuming the punditry of the intellectuals. Together, they constitute the conservative project. Progressivism, however, has become entirely a project of academics and their social peers.
Even in the days when it was not entirely so, there was a Leftist intellectual caste whose thoughts and words working-class leftists found hard to swallow. This was due in part to the tendency of people who conceive of themselves as proletarians to be anti-intellectual snobs. Richard Wright’s sojourn in the Communist Party was blighted when the other rank-and-file comrades heard him "talk like a book." However, it was due also to the inevitably suspect status of people who, unlike Wright, cultivated a revolutionary orchard though they had no need of its fruit themselves: academics and patrons.
Today, the intellectual caste is the Left. Many observers note that this development has brought a shift in the substance of leftist politics from economic concerns to sociocultural ones. They might add that it has brought a rise in the value of language. A prominent linguist of the late twentieth century (I forget who) once remarked that belief in word magic had become mainly a trait of Western intellectuals. By that time, linguistic engineering held a prominent place in the Left’s attempts at social engineering. Educated leftists planted a language tree to supply straight, sturdy timber for this construction project (largely substitutes for words containing man, at first), but then the tree started putting out branches and twigs and leaves and blossoms of great intricacy as if one of its elite cultivators had been shoved inside by a witch. The Left came to talk like an expensive textbook. For purposes of bonding with the masses, that was bad enough; but it was not the worst.
The metamorphosis proceeded through an ever greater obsession with language and an ever greater abundance of words to be affected and words to be abhorred. Anxiety about correctness shaded into preciosity reminiscent of the days when well-bred people substituted limbs for legs. Now the Left talks like one of those little gilt-edged volumes once found in the better sort of home. Now it blushes like the dear reader of such a book. It shrinks from unruly speech, which it equates with violence or menace, while counting on word magic to secure a happy political ending. At last (one hopes), we've reached the point where mindless preciosity doubles back and merges with cynical propaganda to form a nullspeak wherein, for example, -phobe ("one gripped by a categorical fear or aversion") is ripped from its meaning and used as a scarlet suffix with which to mark political sinners. It's a wonder the play doesn't make the players feel too silly to go on with it, unless they calculate that it will influence lesser minds. Their own minds are not quite up to grasping how it undermines their position.
Richard Wright couldn't have foreseen this progression from the liberal to the ridiculous, but he gives us a model for beginning to confront it in his essay "I Tried To Be a Communist" (The Atlantic, August and September 1944). It concerns a zealous comrade called Young, newly arrived from Detroit, who joined the Chicago John Reed Club and soon "became one of the most ardent members of the organization, admired by all." Here are the essential parts of a long account:
Let us be sobered and chastened Democrats before it's too late.
Conservatives are not much troubled by ideology, since there can be only so many competing visions among people who wish to keep things as they are. The right, as always, prizes conformity to established values. The left, as never before, prizes conformity to the values of the moment. It rewards people who can bring forth new wisdom to be made conventional, couched in new terms befitting a law unto itself. That is to say, it provides a living to intellectuals. Conservatism has its intellectuals, but they serve mainly as a Greek chorus to the tragedy of change. Conservative-minded Americans know what they like without consuming the punditry of the intellectuals. Together, they constitute the conservative project. Progressivism, however, has become entirely a project of academics and their social peers.
Even in the days when it was not entirely so, there was a Leftist intellectual caste whose thoughts and words working-class leftists found hard to swallow. This was due in part to the tendency of people who conceive of themselves as proletarians to be anti-intellectual snobs. Richard Wright’s sojourn in the Communist Party was blighted when the other rank-and-file comrades heard him "talk like a book." However, it was due also to the inevitably suspect status of people who, unlike Wright, cultivated a revolutionary orchard though they had no need of its fruit themselves: academics and patrons.
Today, the intellectual caste is the Left. Many observers note that this development has brought a shift in the substance of leftist politics from economic concerns to sociocultural ones. They might add that it has brought a rise in the value of language. A prominent linguist of the late twentieth century (I forget who) once remarked that belief in word magic had become mainly a trait of Western intellectuals. By that time, linguistic engineering held a prominent place in the Left’s attempts at social engineering. Educated leftists planted a language tree to supply straight, sturdy timber for this construction project (largely substitutes for words containing man, at first), but then the tree started putting out branches and twigs and leaves and blossoms of great intricacy as if one of its elite cultivators had been shoved inside by a witch. The Left came to talk like an expensive textbook. For purposes of bonding with the masses, that was bad enough; but it was not the worst.
The metamorphosis proceeded through an ever greater obsession with language and an ever greater abundance of words to be affected and words to be abhorred. Anxiety about correctness shaded into preciosity reminiscent of the days when well-bred people substituted limbs for legs. Now the Left talks like one of those little gilt-edged volumes once found in the better sort of home. Now it blushes like the dear reader of such a book. It shrinks from unruly speech, which it equates with violence or menace, while counting on word magic to secure a happy political ending. At last (one hopes), we've reached the point where mindless preciosity doubles back and merges with cynical propaganda to form a nullspeak wherein, for example, -phobe ("one gripped by a categorical fear or aversion") is ripped from its meaning and used as a scarlet suffix with which to mark political sinners. It's a wonder the play doesn't make the players feel too silly to go on with it, unless they calculate that it will influence lesser minds. Their own minds are not quite up to grasping how it undermines their position.
Richard Wright couldn't have foreseen this progression from the liberal to the ridiculous, but he gives us a model for beginning to confront it in his essay "I Tried To Be a Communist" (The Atlantic, August and September 1944). It concerns a zealous comrade called Young, newly arrived from Detroit, who joined the Chicago John Reed Club and soon "became one of the most ardent members of the organization, admired by all." Here are the essential parts of a long account:
At a meeting one night Young asked that his name be placed upon the agenda; when his time came to speak, he rose and launched into one of the most violent and bitter political attacks in the club's history upon Swann, one of the best young artists. We were aghast. Young accused Swann of being a traitor to the worker, an opportunist, a collaborator with the police, and an adherent of Trotsky. Naturally most of the club’s members assumed that Young, a member of the party, was voicing the ideas of the party. Surprised and baffled, I moved that Young's statement be referred to the executive committee for decision.
...
Determined to end the farce, I cornered Young and demanded to know who had given him authority to castigate Swann.
"I've been asked to rid the club of traitors."
"But Swann isn't a traitor," I said.
"We must have a purge," he said, his eyes bulging, his face quivering with passion.
...
One night ten of us met in an office of a leader of the party to hear Young restate his charges against Swann. The party leader, aloof and amused, gave Young the signal to begin. Young unrolled a sheaf of papers and declaimed a list of political charges that excelled in viciousness his previous charges. I stared at Young, feeling that he was making a dreadful mistake, but fearing him because he had, by his own account, the sanction of high political authority.
...
[Some time later, Young vanished without a word.]
One afternoon Comrade Grimm and I sneaked into the club's headquarters and opened Young's luggage. What we saw amazed and puzzled us. First of all, there was a scroll of paper twenty yards long — one page pasted to another — which had drawings depicting the history of the human race from a Marxist point of view. The first page read: A Pictorial Record of Man's Economic Progress.
"This is terribly ambitious," I said.
"He's very studious," Grimm said.
There were long dissertations written in longhand: some were political and others dealt with the history of art. Finally we found a letter with a Detroit return address and I promptly wrote asking news of our esteemed member. A few days later a letter came which said in part: —
Dear Sir:
In reply to your letter, we beg to inform you that Mr. Young, who was a patient in our institution and who escaped from our custody a few months ago, had been apprehended and returned to this institution for mental treatment.
I was thunderstruck. Was this true? Undoubtedly it was. Then what kind of club did we run that a lunatic could step into it and help run it? Were we all so mad that we could not detect a madman when we saw one?
I made a motion that all charges against Swann be dropped, which was done. I offered Swann an apology, but as the leader of the Chicago John Reed Club I was a sobered and chastened Communist.
Let us be sobered and chastened Democrats before it's too late.
Monday, September 4, 2023
We Are Left Alone
The Family Property seldom goes out on a limb, and then only in the most blundering manner. However, the news of the day presents an irresistible temptation to swing out to the end of the limb and hurl down a handful of certitude about something that even now is being veiled in deep (if erratic) secrecy by the US intelligence community and sternly investigated by a congressional committee.
Planet Earth is not being visited by creatures from outer space.
Earlier this year, a former US Air Force intelligence officer made a personal report to Congress "about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin." His name is David C. Grusch. The article linked and quoted above is the one that broke the story of his whistleblowing after major news outlets demurred. It appeared on a speculative-science website called The Debrief. As it came to be more widely discussed, much was made of the fact that Mr Grusch was an intelligence insider and had been described as "beyond reproach" by a former associate. This was an early warning about the tenor of debate to follow: a willingness to argue from authority. Even "people who should know" are supposed to convince us of what they know about the matter at hand. Even people of certified character have an obligation to deal in demonstrable facts like the dodgiest of us. If Mr Grusch's assertions were supported by solid facts, those facts would be of such enormous news value that he could hardly reveal them fast enough to keep ahead of investigative journalists. In fact, three months have passed without a lead on any substantive evidence from any source. Here, it would be as well to quote from the original article on The Debrief at some length.
That's a lot of grist for the mill of argument from authority. But even if we take it all at face value, what are we to think? This is highly sensitive information about highly secret black programs — and yet Mr Grusch can divulge it with the cooperation of people involved in the programs, and without any disavowal by their higher-ups. The retired colonel who assures us that Mr Grusch is beyond reproach is himself the source of a declaration that "at least some of these technologies ... derive from non-human intelligence" — and yet his character reference should matter. Meanwhile, most news organizations are just teasing the story along, and the rest of us aren't milling in the streets clamoring to know what sort of threat the extraterrestrials may pose. At some level, nobody is taking this at face value.
Mr Grusch has said that he can't talk openly about specifics because they're classified, and yet it seems that the existence and essence of these "highly secret black programs" is not. He allows that he's not the primary source of any of his information but, rather, has had it confided to him at various removes. His informants have gone so far as to claim — he says — that government investigators possess biological remains of "non-human" beings (a term he prefers to alien or extraterrestrial) found along with crashed flying machines. Keeping all that in mind, let's stop and question whether sophisticated people would entertain his testimony if they weren't looking beyond its face value.
Consider the number six. Without context, it seems small. If we're told it represents a distance of 6,000,000 miles, it becomes staggering. If we're told it represents six light-years (roughly the distance, if memory serves*, between Earth and the nearest potentially earth-like planet), it loses its power to stagger because the string of zeros is replaced by a unit which we can't hope to comprehend. We're not talking about flying saucers nipping over from Mars.
The notion of a spacecraft no bigger than a terrestrial aircraft traveling a light-year while sustaining life within it, even in suspended animation, is a non-starter. Why would a highly advanced civilization even wish to attempt an interstellar probe with a live crew instead of relying on its excellent technologies of automation and artificial intelligence? In planning any space mission, take away the warm bodies and you simplify your task immensely. It's common knowledge that NASA carries on manned space flight mainly because it captures the imagination of taxpayers and politicians.
Now, it's possible to imagine — just idly imagine, without attending to difficulties — some civilization making an exodus from a doomed world in a gigantic artificial habitat, with countless generations embarked on the journey since time out of mind. When such a "mother ship" reached the vicinity of Earth, it might dispatch reconnaissance craft similar to the objects that pilots say they've observed. But in that case, why haven't astronomers detected the mother ship? Why hasn't anyone detected incoming reconnaissance craft, if we can detect them when they're in our atmosphere? And why do they crash at an apparently much higher rate than airliners; more like experimental aircraft being test-flown?
No, it's a safe bet that Earth is not being visited by creatures from outer space. So why is Congress investigating, and why has the Pentagon recently moved toward greater transparency in its handling of aerial phenomena? Two possible explanations come to mind.
One possibility is that the government, with the witting or unwitting cooperation of David Grusch, is acting to soften up public opinion for the revelation that terrestrial actors have been getting away with aggressive spying and probing or, what seems more likely, unregulated testing within US territory. Given the many reports of the strange objects' presence contrasted with few if any reports of their approach, they must be operating from domestic bases on the ground. This would be of interest to a congressional committee. At the same time, a portion of the general public would feel relieved after having been teased with visions of space invaders.
The other possibility, which does not exclude that of unregulated testing, is corruption. Mr Grusch, speaking of programs that deal with unidentified aerial phenomena, has stated, "Individuals on these UAP programs approached me in my official capacity and disclosed their concerns regarding a multitude of wrongdoings, such as illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations and other criminality and the suppression of information across a qualified industrial base and academia." Lord Acton would probably be open to the idea that secrecy tends to corrupt and absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely. A long-running "black" program with labyrinthine funding could reach such extremes of corruption, autonomy, and the entanglement of "a qualified industrial base and academia" that reining it in must involve public exposure. The essence of the story may turn out to be that somebody has a reverse-engineering budget but no reverse-engineering work to do.
As for those organic remains found with crashed vehicles, the studied use of the term non-human in preference to alien or extraterrestrial may mean we should be thinking of primates used in testing the effects of those sharp turns at high speed that observers often report. Then again, all the sensational details — the organic remains, the astonishing technology, the "unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures" — may be products of an overextended game of telephone.
That is the view from the end of the limb. If it turns out that Earth has in fact been scouted for invasion, the laugh will be on me. In any case, though, it's a mistake to conflate the surmise that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe with the surmise that it sometimes travels from there to here. The two notions are worlds apart.
Planet Earth is not being visited by creatures from outer space.
Earlier this year, a former US Air Force intelligence officer made a personal report to Congress "about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin." His name is David C. Grusch. The article linked and quoted above is the one that broke the story of his whistleblowing after major news outlets demurred. It appeared on a speculative-science website called The Debrief. As it came to be more widely discussed, much was made of the fact that Mr Grusch was an intelligence insider and had been described as "beyond reproach" by a former associate. This was an early warning about the tenor of debate to follow: a willingness to argue from authority. Even "people who should know" are supposed to convince us of what they know about the matter at hand. Even people of certified character have an obligation to deal in demonstrable facts like the dodgiest of us. If Mr Grusch's assertions were supported by solid facts, those facts would be of such enormous news value that he could hardly reveal them fast enough to keep ahead of investigative journalists. In fact, three months have passed without a lead on any substantive evidence from any source. Here, it would be as well to quote from the original article on The Debrief at some length.
Associates who vouched for Grusch said his information was highly sensitive, providing evidence that materials from objects of non-human origin are in the possession of highly secret black programs. Although locations, program names, and other specific data remain classified, the Inspector General and intelligence committee staff were provided with these details. Several current members of the recovery program spoke to the Inspector General's office and corroborated the information Grusch had provided for the classified complaint.
Grusch left the government on April 7, 2023, in order, he said, to advance government accountability through public awareness. He remains well-supported within intelligence circles, and numerous sources have vouched for his credibility.
"His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence," said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.
That's a lot of grist for the mill of argument from authority. But even if we take it all at face value, what are we to think? This is highly sensitive information about highly secret black programs — and yet Mr Grusch can divulge it with the cooperation of people involved in the programs, and without any disavowal by their higher-ups. The retired colonel who assures us that Mr Grusch is beyond reproach is himself the source of a declaration that "at least some of these technologies ... derive from non-human intelligence" — and yet his character reference should matter. Meanwhile, most news organizations are just teasing the story along, and the rest of us aren't milling in the streets clamoring to know what sort of threat the extraterrestrials may pose. At some level, nobody is taking this at face value.
Mr Grusch has said that he can't talk openly about specifics because they're classified, and yet it seems that the existence and essence of these "highly secret black programs" is not. He allows that he's not the primary source of any of his information but, rather, has had it confided to him at various removes. His informants have gone so far as to claim — he says — that government investigators possess biological remains of "non-human" beings (a term he prefers to alien or extraterrestrial) found along with crashed flying machines. Keeping all that in mind, let's stop and question whether sophisticated people would entertain his testimony if they weren't looking beyond its face value.
Consider the number six. Without context, it seems small. If we're told it represents a distance of 6,000,000 miles, it becomes staggering. If we're told it represents six light-years (roughly the distance, if memory serves*, between Earth and the nearest potentially earth-like planet), it loses its power to stagger because the string of zeros is replaced by a unit which we can't hope to comprehend. We're not talking about flying saucers nipping over from Mars.
The notion of a spacecraft no bigger than a terrestrial aircraft traveling a light-year while sustaining life within it, even in suspended animation, is a non-starter. Why would a highly advanced civilization even wish to attempt an interstellar probe with a live crew instead of relying on its excellent technologies of automation and artificial intelligence? In planning any space mission, take away the warm bodies and you simplify your task immensely. It's common knowledge that NASA carries on manned space flight mainly because it captures the imagination of taxpayers and politicians.
Now, it's possible to imagine — just idly imagine, without attending to difficulties — some civilization making an exodus from a doomed world in a gigantic artificial habitat, with countless generations embarked on the journey since time out of mind. When such a "mother ship" reached the vicinity of Earth, it might dispatch reconnaissance craft similar to the objects that pilots say they've observed. But in that case, why haven't astronomers detected the mother ship? Why hasn't anyone detected incoming reconnaissance craft, if we can detect them when they're in our atmosphere? And why do they crash at an apparently much higher rate than airliners; more like experimental aircraft being test-flown?
No, it's a safe bet that Earth is not being visited by creatures from outer space. So why is Congress investigating, and why has the Pentagon recently moved toward greater transparency in its handling of aerial phenomena? Two possible explanations come to mind.
One possibility is that the government, with the witting or unwitting cooperation of David Grusch, is acting to soften up public opinion for the revelation that terrestrial actors have been getting away with aggressive spying and probing or, what seems more likely, unregulated testing within US territory. Given the many reports of the strange objects' presence contrasted with few if any reports of their approach, they must be operating from domestic bases on the ground. This would be of interest to a congressional committee. At the same time, a portion of the general public would feel relieved after having been teased with visions of space invaders.
The other possibility, which does not exclude that of unregulated testing, is corruption. Mr Grusch, speaking of programs that deal with unidentified aerial phenomena, has stated, "Individuals on these UAP programs approached me in my official capacity and disclosed their concerns regarding a multitude of wrongdoings, such as illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations and other criminality and the suppression of information across a qualified industrial base and academia." Lord Acton would probably be open to the idea that secrecy tends to corrupt and absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely. A long-running "black" program with labyrinthine funding could reach such extremes of corruption, autonomy, and the entanglement of "a qualified industrial base and academia" that reining it in must involve public exposure. The essence of the story may turn out to be that somebody has a reverse-engineering budget but no reverse-engineering work to do.
As for those organic remains found with crashed vehicles, the studied use of the term non-human in preference to alien or extraterrestrial may mean we should be thinking of primates used in testing the effects of those sharp turns at high speed that observers often report. Then again, all the sensational details — the organic remains, the astonishing technology, the "unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures" — may be products of an overextended game of telephone.
That is the view from the end of the limb. If it turns out that Earth has in fact been scouted for invasion, the laugh will be on me. In any case, though, it's a mistake to conflate the surmise that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe with the surmise that it sometimes travels from there to here. The two notions are worlds apart.
* Memory did not serve. The distance is 4.5 light years, as noted by Justin E.H. Smith in "Where do aliens come from?"
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