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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:
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...
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.
How do you square this assertion, with, well, the entire edifice of modernity built upon the shoulders of giants, given that many of those giants were absolute shitheads in their personal lives? Normally this kind of thing comes up in a "Oh no Isaac Newton used the bad word" or a "cinema is built on Woody Allen and what about MeToo?" type context, I'm curious how you handle it. Because for every founding father who was a slaveholder, I can point to many more who had mistresses.
As for Molly and modernity, this argument tends to make me think the idea of free will is probably overstated. Butler's backwards rationalizations for the behavior of his wife might smack of modernity, the story itself seems more along the lines of Carmen or Anna Karennina or Madame Bovary.
I think there's a lot of romanticization of individual geniuses, especially when those geniuses were purported to (or actually had) turbulent personal lives. In both the purely creative pursuits (fine art, literature, dance, film, whatever...) and in hard sciences, economics, politics, etc. I think there's a difference between a vision and its realization. Let's say Isaac Newton was just a real son-of-a-bitch 24/7. Yes, his contributions are immense, but the realization of his ideas and concepts was born on the backs of hundreds of thousands of anonymous individuals who had to be far less rotten. Woody Allen's cinematic brilliance is super, but didn't it take the existence of Hollywood production teams and a corps of actors to make it "real"?
The internet is pretty good at showing that a lot of people have really damn good ideas, but lack the ability to execute on them. If you're an asshole with an idea, you're an asshole. If you're an asshole who execute (@FiveHourMarathon might say) .... should you be forgiven or, at least, tolerated? I think this is a red herring - nobody really executes on their own save for some pure creative types (authors, painters, etc.) and even these folks are "executing" in a realm that almost completely abstract ideas anyway.
I'm not sure if this helps - as off the top of my head as my own posts are, my comments are even more half baked. I'll admit that @FiveHourMarathon's inquiry did make me stop and think. I hope the screed above repays you in kind.
Well, my view is that when we have certain representative varieties of sin which are extraordinarily common among the capital-G Carlyle-esque Great, one faces a choice: to beatify the sin itself as part and parcel of greatness, to minimize it as unrelated to greatness and irrelevant, or to reject the greatness of the individual to achieve moral purity. Each is appropriate in certain cases.
It's not that mainstream to see people say "All my heroes cheated on their spouses, so I should cheat on my spouse" or "all the founding fathers were racist so guess I am too" though I suppose it happens on the margins. But we certainly see it in hustle culture and capitalism: my heroes don't sleep enough so I don't sleep enough, my heroes ignore their personal lives so I ignore my family. And we see it with artists, especially art-student poseurs: all the great artists were drug addicts so I'll take drugs irresponsibly, all the great artists had messy personal lives so I will mistreat my romantic partners, all the great artists were vague and inscrutable so I will be unfriendly and weird.
Minimizing it used to be the mainstream position, but has been decried in recent years, when no man is a hero to his valet but we all must read the valet's tell-all. I tend to think this is the best option, that it creates myths is good, myths give us something to live up to. I think the apocryphal stories of Robert E Lee giving up his seat on the train to a poor elderly negress are good for anti-racism, they allow for those who idolize Lee to be rehabilitated into the mainstream of society, they allow for the mainstream of society to embrace a brilliant general, they create a narrative in which hatred of Blacks is not the core of American identity etc. The progressive urge to tar Lee as a racist is a net negative for the cause of anti-racism, it drives off as many as it brings in.
The third is the common progressive metoo battle cry. I find it lacking. There are simply too many monsters in history, to remove them leaves our literature and our myths gap-toothed. It is too Stalinist to un-person someone for any sin. We can acknowledge the sins and still watch the film.
This is the one my original post attempted to zero in on.
Bingo.
I don't think I can add anything more, so I'll leave you with this excellent additional example - "Until you can win 20 in the show, it means your a slob". "Until you've written Ulysses you're just a drunk, masturbating Irishman."
That is truly one of the greatest films of all time, yet it is so unrelentingly weird. I remember that every time I watch it.
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I'm not sure what difference this makes. If you don't tolerate the asshole with the ideas and concepts (and Newton had rather more than that), there's nothing for your well-behaved anonymous executors to execute on. One could argue that if we didn't tolerate the sons-of-bitches we'd get the same thing a little slower when a nicer genius came along, but honestly there's too many sons-of-a-bitch geniuses for me to believe that. There are some exceptions (both the lesser and greater Curie, for instance, seem to have been reasonable people), but not all that many. This could be because geniuses tend to be sons-of-bitches or maybe because there's just a preponderance of sons-of-bitches overall, but either way, you're greatly restricting yourself if you don't tolerate the SOB geniuses.
Hmm....we might be leaning in the direction of a top post update from me. Credit to @The_Nybbler and @FiveHourMarathon. Guess it was a good thing it was a semi-rant post ("I just lost a dollar, to MYSELF")
I'm thinking now of Mr. Musk. Absolute SOB .... but he's paving the way for a lot of other good work to be done in the physical engineering realms.
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