thejdizzler
3d ago
I don't believe that this is the case. The kind of violence present in Blood Meridian is very much not inherent to nature. Animals do not engage in the kind of orgy of killing that Glanton's gang gets up to.
thejdizzler
3d ago
I did not view Blood Meridian as suggesting that violence is inherent to human nature. The judge wants you to think that's the theme, but the judge is a liar. I think Blood Meridian also wants you to see how a system of social pressure allows people to commit violent acts without blinking an eye because everyone else is doing it. The judge claims that this is a property inherent to humans, but from the first moment we meet the judge he is lying to get people to do what he wants, so why would he be telling the full truth when he monologues to the reader (credit to my friend Emory for this realization).
thejdizzler
3d ago
My B, I def meant A Game of Thrones.
I’m thinking of the series before book 5 where it goes off into crazy land. I like books 5-7 but i recognize that they are objectively bad, especially book 7 with its author insert and Spiderman 3 syndrome. I did genuinely enjoy the ending and I think the message genuinely resonated with me when I read the books. In terms of the focus on violence I’m really specifically thinking about The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, which capture the over the top violence and tarot symbolism of BM without the purple prose, and with dialogue marks and actual character development.
thejdizzler
3d ago
The two towers? Never said anything about that.
With the gunslinger in particular, i see a lot of parallels between the judge and the man in black. The man in black through the whole first book is forcing roland to commit terrible acts of violence: murdering a whole town of people, pushing jake into the abyss, etc
With Game of Thrones I think the parallel is even more clear. There are specific characters who basically come straight out of BM (Gregor Clegane) and even characters who have some more moral complexity don’t hesitate to brutalize the peasantry in a way that Glanton’s gang would find very familiar.
thejdizzler
4d ago
- Work. Still in this UK class, having a great time. Becoming Europilled.
- Fitness: Mileage suffered a little with travel last week but still did 40 miles and 1x tempo session! Back to normal this week I think. Saw the lowest heart rate I've ever record this week (39).
- Intellectual stuff: finished Blood Meridian finally. Terrible book, I think both Game of Thrones and The Dark Tower books do the theme much better. Learning loads of language/other stuff from my European colleagues.
- Finances: Not even thinking about this until the end of the month.
- Dating. I've very quickly redeleted my dating apps again. Not helpful
- Tarot. No session.
- Socializing: Been very social in bath
- Screen time: 2.5 hours, but makes sense given travel!
- Mental health: Pretty good, although lots of anxiety on this travel trip
I do not fantasize about castrating chad anymore. I was shown the errors of my ways.
thejdizzler
4d ago
The idea that we need to regulate the sexual marketplace via tradition is definitely a conservative view. Not a libertarian view mind you, but libertarians arent really rightists.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Resident leftist here (at least on some topics: degrowth, veganism, openness to at least reading about things like Marxism). I don't feel like I fit in either of your categories (freshly educated zoomer, troll). I sometimes get dogpiled here, but my most severe dogpile came from a rather rightest view (castrate all chads), and I think that I have both learned quite a bit from this forum, and hopefully also done some enlightening myself.
thejdizzler
9d ago
On the contrary, I think they're directly in conflict. Each rocket launch represents thousands of tons of carbon released into the atmosphere. I know climate change isn't a popular hobby horse on this forum (which I think is silly), but I believe it is one of the largest crises of our time, especially given the recent heat waves in Europe. Why risk even further climate destabilization just to push forward colonization a few thousand years when we're talking about billion year time scales.
In a similar vein, every engineer at SpaceX probably could have another kid or two if they weren't working so hard, which would be good for the gene people. And they could be working on more socially useful technologies. Although if I'm being honest, SpaceX isn't really the main problem in the sucking up talent space: it's finance.
thejdizzler
9d ago
You're talking about timescales many thousands of times longer than the existence of human civilization or indeed of any human institution. How about we work on making those things actually sustainable over the long term before we worry about interplanetary colonization.
You might hand-wave this point, but it's not clear to me that we are doing this at all. In fact, there are many indications that we are outrunning our own carrying capacity here, or at leas our own ability to keep a complex society going (see climate change, 6th mass extinction, birth rate collapse). It seems delusional to focus on something so so long term when we can't even keep our population stable or stop fouling our own garden.
thejdizzler
10d ago
The thing is I believe there is no accurate comparison to space colonization because it basically completely detethers us from our own ecology and biology in a way that transatlantic voyages did not. The kind of person that thinks that they want to colonize Mars (the cowboy/Lone Ranger archetype) is incredibly ill-suited to such a venture because of the extremely tight constraints that will inevitably exist in terms of resource usage and time allocation in the first mars colonies. The first mars colonists will basically be living under martial law in caves where they rarely if ever see the sun. This sounds much better suited to the corporate drones who already do very well in existing hierarchies here on earth.
thejdizzler
10d ago
True, but Musk is responsible to his shareholders now (or at least partially). He chose to make spaceX a publicly traded company, which comes with expectations of profitability, at least eventually.
thejdizzler
11d ago
This post gets to the heart of what my problem with the space colonization hype train that seems to be popular on this site. What exactly is the profit motive? Starlink seems very useful and profitable. Colonizing Mars? Not so much, unless investors are willing to eat losses for many decades.
thejdizzler
11d ago
- Work. At a class in the UK for the next two weeks, then vacation in Germany. Travel to the UK was a bit of a shit show (cancelation, missed connection, and finally a lost bag). Research environment in Europe is much more chill, but also very inferior to the US.
- Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions again last week and 60 miles. Weight is continuing to drop as I have kind of lost my appetite with the heat.
- Intellectual stuff: finished a blog post for this month, and working on my Spanish/Italian as usual. Almost done with Blood Meridian, but it's like pulling teeth.
- Finances: Not even thinking about this until the end of the month.
- Dating. My roommate convinced me to redownload dating apps, which I think was a mistake.
- Tarot. No session.
- Socializing: nice change of environment has got to me excited to socialized and meet people!
- Screen time: 1 hour!
- Mental health: Pretty good, although lots of anxiety on this travel trip
thejdizzler
15d ago
I need to read Huysmans before I read this novel again, because I'm almost entirely convinced that François' piece that he writes about Huysmans during the book (as an introduction to a new edition of the collected works) is cynical and wrong. From my understanding of the second to last chapter, François basically labels Huysmans as a hedonist whose real interests lie in just submitting to his passions, exactly what François plans to do when he converts to Islam. Right before he decides to probably convert, François also takes a trip to the monastery where Huysmans had his revelation/began his conversion. He lives within about 12 hours because he can't handle the austere environment and also I think because he feels guilty about what he's about to do when he gets back.
I think the conversion has to be completely cynical, and Huysmans serves as a foil rather than an emulation. But again, I'd have to read Huysmans to be more sure.
thejdizzler
16d ago
Yea, I mainly did that (see the markdown elsewhere), but missed this one. Thanks!
thejdizzler
16d ago
No I don't, clarified!
I’ve already reviewed Submission once, back in 2024, but I found myself drawn back to Houellebecq, and Submission in particular earlier this year. Maybe it’s because he’s the equivalent of romantasy for dudes [1], and I remain unfortunately single at the time of writing this article. Maybe spring in Baltimore was too nice and I needed a dose of depressing nihilism. Or maybe I just needed to reread something that I’d already read in English in Spanish. Whatever the case, I was not planning on reviewing the book again when I started my reread: I felt like my last review covered all the bases of the book pretty nicely.
However, both when I suggested the book for a potential summer of fiction in philosophy book club, and when I posted a short positive review on instagram for my June book summary, the reaction from friends and family was overwhelmingly one of disgust and negativity. Why in the world was I reading a near-porno by a creepy old islamophobic misogynist about a fantasy scenario where 10% of the population somehow takes over the government of very secular France? I tried to respond as best as I could, but my on the fly defense of Houellebecq and my last essay didn’t seem to actually cut it.
What follows is my attempt to define why exactly I think this is a good book: that it’s witty and effective satire that holds up a dark mirror for the intellectual classes in the West, and also why you should maybe be more open to reading things written by people you disagree with [2].
Short Plot Summary (spoilers)
Like all Houellebecq novels, the main character, François, is a 40-something Frenchman with little going on in his life. His proudest moment was over 15 years ago when he defended his gargantuan thesis on Joris-Karl Huysmans, a pessimist novelist from the end of the 19th century. Because of this work, François was able to land a faculty position at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he halfheartedly teaches a class on 19th century literature and tries to seduce a couple of his students a semester. At the beginning of the novel, François is attempting to reignite a relationship with one of his former student lovers, Myriam, but after the surprise election of the charismatic Muslim Mohammed Ben-Abbas to presidency, Myriam flees to Israel and François is relieved of his faculty position at the Sorbonne because he is not Muslim. After a hectic few months in which his parents both die, and he very tepidly attempts to reconnect with Catholicism, François returns to Paris and is courted by the new minister of education, Robert Redinger, to convert to Islam and return to the faculty of the Sorbonne. François is bribed with the promise of a lot of money and multiple hot young wives, as polygamy is now legal in France. The novel ends with his choice being left up in the air (heavy use of the conditional tense, especially obvious in Spanish).
Islamophobia?
Numerous critics and friends have described this book as Islamophobic. I have to wonder if we read the same book. Islam is presented in no worse a light than the trad/RETVRN movement in Christianity that the left-wingers crying Islamophobia love to criticize themselves. Ben-Abbes’ party, which mainly has control of education as a result of the deal that his party, the Muslim Brotherhood, struck with the socialists to win the presidency and prevent the election of Marine Le Pen, merely reduces the educational opportunities afforded to women [3], and also heavily encourages them to leave the workplace and focus on caring for family instead. There are no crazy suicide bombings, unlike another of Houellebecq’s books, and the Islamic movement is basically portrayed in a completely nonviolent light.
As I’ll get to later, Houellebecq really doesn’t like Islam. So why does he pull so many punches and make Ben-Abbes’ government seem reasonable or even laudable in a certain sense? I’ll argue that critiquing Islam isn’t really the goal of this book. If it was, Houellebecq certainly wouldn’t have concocted this frankly ridiculous scenario where a group that makes up 10% of the population of France (and even less in other European countries) seizes the reins of not only political but also cultural power in the span of a few months. No, the purpose of Islam is to hold up a dark mirror to François and the other real-life intellectuals like him.
The treatment of women in mainstream and conservative Islam is something a lot of people, including me, have trouble with. François, and the narrative itself, are even worse. Women basically only appear in this book as “tetas y culo” or as house help in the background, and François only ever thinks of his students as potential sex objects, and his colleagues as washed-up and useless. Even the woman that François supposedly loves, Myriam, is conveniently thrown under the bus as soon as the political situation makes it so that he has to lift a finger to actually interact with her. Even in conservative households where women’s freedoms are severely restricted the men usually actually you know, love their wives and treat them with some measure of care and respect. That’s a little too much to ask apparently for mister François PhD.
Intellectually it’s perhaps even worse. In the novel, Robert Redinger, the new dean of education who converted to Islam many years before the book began, tells us that the word Islam literally means “submission”. I took this to imply that there would be some level of censorship of what François and other professors were producing. Yet censorship seems far preferable to inactivity, which is basically what our protagonist has been doing since he finished his dissertation. And it also doesn’t seem very necessary: François seems perfectly willing to self-censor and twist his interpretation of Huysmans to suit his new masters, and seems much more concerned with how many wives he’ll be getting rather than if he actually believes in the propositions that Islam makes about the world.
Of course François is a product of his atomized and rootless time: his parents are divorced and dead, he has no long-term relationships to speak of, and he’s never had to do a single hard day of work in his life, except for perhaps on his thesis. Yet that does not excuse the pathetic abdication of all moral and intellectual responsibility to the world in which he lives.
Death of the Author
Of course if you haven’t read the book (carefully), it’s very difficult to avoid the interpretation of this whole thing as bigotry when the author has said things like:
The most stupid religion is Islam.
Islam is a dangerous religion.
When you read the Koran you give up. At least the bible is beautiful because Jews have literary talent.
or
Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realize that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead.
Michel Houellebecq is an islamophobe and he is a misogynist. Yet that doesn’t have to change your interpretation of the text, and, if anything, I think it’s a reason to read Submission rather than avoid it.
We live in times of impending great change. Just as Rome went from pagan to Christian within the span of a generation [4], we live in a time where the cultural and ideological makeup of our communities and nations is at a tipping point. The total fertility rate (TFR) of almost every country outside of Africa is less than 2. Western nations in particular are reliant on a pyramid demographic scheme that has already begun to collapse under its own weight in countries like Japan and Italy. Modernity, and its atomized striver culture, is making us lonely and miserable. Business as usual means a future almost certainly like the one that Houellebecq predicted here: cultures with the highest TFR don’t seem to care too much about the liberation of women. More than 50% of the United States and nearly 50% of France voted for Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen, whose views are just as challenging to the neoliberal consensus, if in a fundamentally different way to Ben Abbas. We must have the courage to engage with books like Submission that don’t paint the future in such a pleasant light, and the imagination and fortitude to create and fight for one that we do believe in.
1 Including the abundance of extremely uncomfortable sex scenes. No dragons unless it’s that tattoo on one of the Thai prostitutes in Platform.
2 Houellebecq actually is Islamophobic and misogynistic.
3 By denying them scholarships at public universities. Women who really want to can get an education at private universities.
4 Houellebecq draws many parallels to Rome in this book
thejdizzler
17d ago
thejdizzler
17d ago
You sound like my boomer dad. Just resist all social engineering and social pressure and muscle through. What bullshit.
thejdizzler
17d ago
The medium is the message bro. Our material environment fundamentally changes how we interact with each other. Yes humans are agents that can make decisions, but those decisions are heavily influenced by our environment. No technology is a blank slate, but conditions us for certain behaviors via its design. The smartphone has been engineer very deliberately to alter your behavior. Don't believe me, just ask Tristan Harris. Your logic doesn't follow.
thejdizzler
17d ago
I can't tell if this is satire or not, but if not I could not disagree more with this take.
thejdizzler
17d ago
Is it the damn phones?. A new article from one of my favorite energy bloggers suggests that the cratering of fertility rates (which were stable for much of the late 20th century and early aughts) could be driven by the adoption of smartphones. I'm personally rather convinced by this hypothesis, as many of the other explanations given by both people on this forum (status) and in-real life (economics, fear about the future) fall apart with counter examples. You're really telling me that motherhood is now equally low status in the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Africa to depress fertility below 2, or that middle-class young white people are so economically oppressed that they can't have kids? I don't buy it. The smartphone, and its related access to a 24/7, truly global media environment seems to the only material change that could cross so many geographic and cultural lines. There's also a ton of causal mechanisms: hypergamy for instagram baddies, less time interacting with people in person so fewer marriages and thus fewer babies, and atrophied social skills for when interactions do happen in the wild.
Of course a lot of the effects of the smartphone can't be decoupled from high-modernity in general and its culture of extreme convenience and isolation, nor from related technologies like social media and short-form video content. And the groups that seem to avoid this depression in fertility seem to avoid all of these technologies.
I haven't killed my smartphone just yet, but I did delete all my dating apps about a month ago and have stayed off of them for the longest time since I last had a girlfriend. More in person relationships for me in the future I hope.
thejdizzler
17d ago
- Work. Still feeling a bit unmotivated this summer. Heading to the UK for a class on July 4th (very patriotic of me).
- Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions again last week and 61 miles. Up to 28% of Baltimore City. Weight has finally dropped to 168. Guess I was holding on to a bit of water weight for a while which allowed a sudden loss. This gives me some hope I can get into the low 160s high 150s by the Chicago marathon.
- Intellectual Stuff: attended a degrowth/abundance salon which was very inspiring, although I worry that most of the people there made it into a bit of an echo chamber! Hoping to read a bit more this month. Also realized how filled with typos many of my posts and texts have been. Something to work on in the next few months.
- Finances: -7% savings rate this month which while bad could have been a lot worse with increased travel and rent expenses.
- Dating. No dating apps continues to be nice. Kissed the girl I made pizza with at the end of the date. Not sure if there's a connection, but we both want to hang out again.
- Tarot. No session.
- Socializing: Still feeling a little unbalanced on the socialization side.
- Screen time: 1.4 hours phone. I'm honestly not thinking about this much, but I could scroll on instagram and Strava much less than I do.
- Mental health: Pretty good, although I wake up to a cortisol spike a bit too early I the morning. Would like to be able to get to bed a little earlier than I do.
Upvoted for a really nice McCarthy parody. Laughed a lot.
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