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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25692 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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(Mixed rant / actual CW post. I defer to the Delphic wisdom of the mods to discern this)

New book by Blake Butler out.

New Yorker Review.

Marginal Revolution blogpost.

What caught my eye was the uncharacteristically vitriolic nature of Tyler Cowen's post. He flatly states "I don’t know of any better argument for social conservatism than this book." That's the culture war angle which I invite comments on. It produced some thoughts regarding household privacy which I hadn't thought of before. Would there be progress across all of the trans/COVID restrictions/guns/abortion issues if we frame it as "just don't talk about some stuff and we're all fine."

But on to the semi-rant part.

It seems like both Butler and his wife are people supremely in touch with the importance of their own emotions and, even worse, their own perspectives of their own emotions. It really does seem like the unending continuation of a sophomore's first late-night dorm room pseudo-philosophy discussion. "But like, I feel like ... I kind of ... get it, man."

Take this from the review:

She is a ferociously hard worker, committed to her writing and her teaching (she is a professor of creative writing), and also to baking—an art, like poetry, that depends on precision. She loves philosophy and nature, Melville, Cocteau, the Detroit Pistons, and “The Office.” He is touched by her fragility, her willingness to expose herself to him. “Love someone back. / You just begin,” she writes in her poem “Hopes Up,” and, eventually, he takes her advice.

Philosophy. Nature. Baking. The Office(!). And two sentence platitude poetry. Forgive me if I'm not with "it" or, even worse, if, like Abe Simpson, I don't even know what "it" is anymore, but this seems like almost a parody of a bad basic b*tch dating profile. I wonder, would she have described herself as "quirky." I'll quickly chastise myself here for disrespecting someone who has taken her own life. Let's move to a deeper question.

From all accounts, Molly, Butler's wife, seemed to be a deeply troubled person who allowed her mental health issues to fester to such an extent that she behaved extremely poorly. True emotional spousal abuse, almost gleeful infidelity before and during marriage, and some questionable professional-personal decisions. Yet all of it seems to have been hand-waved away through a self-serving belief in some sort of deeper understanding of "the human condition." I remember thinking something similar when reading Christopher Hitchens on his own drinking. Hitch was a raging alcoholic, and he knew this. When he wrote about it, however...

I work at home, where there is indeed a bar-room, and can suit myself.… At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there.

Oh, ho ho! What a card! Yes, he's sauced beyond belief, but have you seen his turn of phrase?.

It's a simple assertion; no amount of genius - real, imagined, or self-perceived - excuses you from being degenerate, abusive, socially irresponsible, or actively antagonistic. My worry is that Mr. Butler and his late wife were constantly so self-absorbed that they used a mix of literary romance, hyper-rationalization, and substance abuse to avoid engaging with a very normal, good, and productive feeling: guilt.

I've written before about how modern society ripped away traditional male gender toles and how that could be good, bad, or a mix. That's beside the point. The point is that it failed to produce any sort of replacement. It's a void and we're seeing the fruits of that.

In terms of guilt, a movement away from traditional religion may be good, bad, or mixed, but there's been no secular alternative. The Catholic church has a very prescriptive system and process for the sin-guilt-penance feedback loop[^1] I do not see the same in the modern secular culture. In fact, I see the opposite. The pop-psych concept of "self care" appears, to me, to be a blank check for instant and unequivocal absolution from responsibility. Did you sleep with a bunch of your spouse's friends, randos, and some of your own students? Do you have a drinking problem that's causing you to fail in your high trust relationships? Do you use social media as a social weapon? - take some time to understand your own trauma and experience. Where's the part about going "holy shit, I fucked up bad here and need to say sorry."?

This all ties up to a larger theory that modern and postmodern culture does two things that are mutually reinforcing in a downward spiral. (1) Emphasize the individual above all else (even the immediate family) and (2) Remove traditional social structures, expectations, and rituals and replace them with nothing so that the only refuge is deeper back into hyper-individualism. Sprinkle in our du jour oppression narratives and class struggle and you've got the perfect recipe for a level of personal-self deception that leads, ultimately, to self-destruction; suicide, in Molly's case.[^2]

Nature abhors a vacuum (I can use that cliche because I'm a bad writer who can't get published). It follows that those going around in their Hoover Uniforms and actually creating vacuums are truly deplorable.

[^1]: I know this religion the best, which is why I named dropped it. My assumption is that the other Abrahamics, at least, have something similar. [^2]: Caveat that I am not wholly blaming modern culture for causing Molly's mental illness, but I am saying it probably abetted its growth and the lady's ultimate demise.

I think this passage from a recent Sam Kriss newsletter on the backlash to "trad" stuff and religiosity he sees brewing is an accurate forecast of the response to these sort of critiques.

I am not an atheist. But I can tell when there’s a gap in the market a mile wide. This year, we’ll see the first stirrings of something new. It will, of course, involve a rejection of God and an incredulity towards religious ideas, along with a contempt for mass-market mysticism: manifesting, angel numbers, that sort of thing. But while the last atheist project took religious ideas on face value, as propositional claims about the existence of a supreme being, this one won’t be able to. Because so many of the most prominent believers now are like Ayaan Hirsi Ali: they don’t believe in God, not really, but they do believe in their own need for belief. There’s a new dogma, which holds that the experience of modernity has left us utterly lost, without any meaningful narratives to make sense of our lives, without any meaningful communities to support us, cut off from the deep riches of the past, abstracted from the earth and its cycles, from procreation and childrearing, even alienated from our own gender, stuck in a technological daydream, alone… I might have made a few observations in this vein myself. But the next atheism will have little time for this sort of whingeing. Sorry, it will reply, but all that anomie is just another word for freedom. We have been liberated from necessity. We have overcome our biology. Modernity is amazing. And of course freedom has its dangers; there are always some people who’ll end up addicted to dumb pleasures, or wandering in circles, or paralysed in fear of the open sky. But it’s still better to be a wild animal than an animal in a cage, and this pining after lost certainties is just the cry of an animal who can’t make it in the wild, desperate to be put back in its cage. No dice, bitch! The glory and the tragedy of our existential condition is that we are condemned to be free! And then, in about seven or eight years, this argument will be another smug flatulent dogma. Another seven or eight years after that, and religion will come back. For reasons that must remain mysterious to us, this is how God has chosen to regulate our affairs.

His hypothetical critic's view of this sort of talk strikes me as accurate. People used to a captivity of sorts freaking out over the prospect of choosing what to do with one's life and find one's own meaning for it rather than having someone else pick it for you, now that the old shackles that restricted the lives of prior generations have rusted through in some areas so some may slip out of them and go their own way. IME having lived in the kind of strict traditionalist religious rural community that many aspiring trads seem to salivate over, in such worlds there are no shortages of people with badly managed mental health problems damaging themselves and others.

His hypothetical critic's view of this sort of talk strikes me as accurate.

To me it feels like seeing a commercial for a brand that hasn't been stocked on shelves for decades. I'm sorry, where is all this liberation? Who are all these people who believe freedom is more important than safety? Our society is full of surveillance and control over even the pettiest aspects of our lives, how am I supposed to take any of this talk about "living in the wild" seriously?

nothing says "living in the wild" like living in a welfare state, these people live in another reality alright.

Not gonna lie, you had me until you concluded with "But there are also crazy people in conservative communities."

There sure are. I didn't say they're weren't. In fact, I explicitly said that replacing some religious informed traditional models of society could be good, bad, or mixed. I am not actually a reactionary. I did say, however, that a void (which your post in the quote of Sam Kriss does an excellent job of illustrating) is a bad thing.

Let me reemphasize: I am not advocating for a snap-back return to pre-1869 western societal structures.

When you say "People used to a captivity of sorts freaking out over the prospect of choosing what to do with one's life and find one's own meaning for it rather than having someone else pick it for you, now that the old shackles that restricted the lives of prior generations have rusted through in some areas so some may slip out of them and go their own way," I think you're, first, minimizing the self-determination that conservative / traditional folks still do (I would say, must) exercise. Second, and much more importantly, people "going their own way" is often not benign. An eccentric hermit who spends his days writing in the nude on his own property is a far cry from the paranoid-schizophrenic so detached from reality that he puts a bystander into a position that could cost the latter his freedom.

To me, this is a kind of unrealistic libertarianism. "You just do you. I'll do me. The rest is fine" falls apart pretty damn fast if we believe that extra-judicial violence is bad, public goods exist, and contract law is ... a thing. But, hey, I'm probably just afraid of that level of freedom.

Not gonna lie, you had me until you concluded with "But there are also crazy people in conservative communities."

To clarify, that was addressed towards the linked Tyler Cowan discussion saying that he didn't know of a better argument for social conservatism than that book.

I think you're, first, minimizing the self-determination that conservative / traditional folks still do (I would say, must) exercise.

Please clarify on what you mean. I have noticed a disproportionate number rightist mottizens seem to be from left wing areas, especially progressive urban areas of the California, the Pacific Northwest or New England, and having broken with a default worldview of left liberalism see rightism as an independent minded rebellious choice of sorts, with very few being from hard conservative areas where right wing views, religious zeal, strict men's dominance over women, etc are the default majority worldviews and having those is a matter of inheritance and conformity with ones surroundings, with left views being the break. If you mean self-determination in the break with the surroundings sense, that could explain it.

Second, and much more importantly, people "going their own way" is often not benign. An eccentric hermit who spends his days writing in the nude on his own property is a far cry from the paranoid-schizophrenic so detached from reality that he puts a bystander into a position that could cost the latter his freedom.

The examples given mention traditional social structures, expectations, etc. Think more secularism rather than going to church, or having equal division of labor in a relationship versus traditional gender dynamics more than the mentally ill yelling about little green men on the sidewalk.

To me, this is a kind of unrealistic libertarianism. "You just do you. I'll do me. The rest is fine" falls apart pretty damn fast if we believe that extra-judicial violence is bad, public goods exist, and contract law is ... a thing. But, hey, I'm probably just afraid of that level of freedom.

I'd characterize it more as a previous set of man-made structures having grown rickety and eventually collapsed as the winds and rains rolled through, incapable of withstanding the challenges of the changing climate, with some people pining for the old building styles that can't handle the new weather now while there's also an explosion of people fiddling with different building styles and materials to see what man-made structures work for them and hold up, which crumple, and so on. And at the same time, you have areas where the old man-made structures haven't been challenged by weather changes yet and still are standing. The fracture of the old structures in some areas giving the opening for better ones to be developed.

To clarify, that was addressed towards the linked Tyler Cowan discussion saying that he didn't know of a better argument for social conservatism than that book.

Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying. Cowan is weird too in that he seems to be broadly ambivalent about social politics most of the time and then will come out with things like this from left field. I mean, Blake Butler is very very into experimental prose territory. I was surprise Cowan had Butler's new book on his radar whatsoever (come to think of it .... was probably just the New Yorker review. Cowan is an O.G. haute-couture literary type)

Please clarify on what you mean. I have noticed a disproportionate number rightist mottizens seem to be from left wing areas, especially progressive urban areas of the California, the Pacific Northwest or New England, and having broken with a default worldview of left liberalism see rightism as an independent minded rebellious choice of sorts, with very few being from hard conservative areas where right wing views, religious zeal, strict men's dominance over women, etc are the default majority worldviews and having those is a matter of inheritance and conformity with ones surroundings, with left views being the break.

Currently live in a "hard conservative" area in the Old Confederacy. I was responding to your initial assertion regarding conservatives / traditionalists living a life that had already been mapped out for them (or something to that effect - I'd direct quote, but I'm in a weird spot with the editor and afraid of losing my comment here). The problem is that trying to live that "mapped out" life is very difficult to impossible even in "hard conservative" areas. What's far more common is public displays of fealty to those old ideals, paired with a sort of domestic realpolitik wherein family structures are far more modern (and post modern) than folks want to admit. Here's a neato example. If you really want to live in an actual conservative/traditional directed life, you have to make that choice everyday.

If you mean self-determination in the break with the surroundings sense, that could explain it.

Broadly, this.

The examples given mention traditional social structures, expectations, etc. Think more secularism rather than going to church, or having equal division of labor in a relationship versus traditional gender dynamics more than the mentally ill yelling about little green men on the sidewalk.

The former leads to the latter. They're inextricably linked. Lorenzo Warby's masterwork "Worshipping the Future" demonstrates this (and is engrossing it is readablility)

I'd characterize it more as a previous set of man-made structures having grown rickety and eventually collapsed as the winds and rains rolled through, incapable of withstanding the challenges of the changing climate, with some people pining for the old building styles that can't handle the new weather now while there's also an explosion of people fiddling with different building styles and materials to see what man-made structures work for them and hold up, which crumple, and so on. And at the same time, you have areas where the old man-made structures haven't been challenged by weather changes yet and still are standing. The fracture of the old structures in some areas giving the opening for better ones to be developed.

Awesome extended metaphor, but I got lost. I don't understand what you are saying.

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